“I couldn’t hate somebody more if I tried, let me put it real nicely: if you were on fire, I wouldn’t put water on you, I’d just watch you die. Truly I wish you a bad, bad life.”
I worked my way through about 200 submissions to the blog on Friday – as you can imagine, it can take something pretty special to stand out amongst those. When I haven’t been listening to the new record from The Vaccines on repeat, the chorus from this one has been circulating my head a lot this weekend…
The track is If You Were On Fire by Mathilda Homer, taken from her new EP of the same name, which also features previous singles Rock Bottom, I’m Sorry and Something Sentimental. The unique blend of Mathilda’s broad vocal range and the humour found within her lyrics makes for something pretty magical.
Inspired by Martha Wainwright’s Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole, the track sees Mathilda venting her feelings of frustration towards the events of 2020 and people in power. She explains: “I had my coat on ready to leave and then asked Matt and Danny [The Six] if they’d ever heard ‘bloody mother fucking asshole’. It was around the time that people were storming the White House, and I felt a heavy weight of all of the injustices that were going on in the world. It’s a song about the horrible people in high power. We wrote it in about 30 minutes, it was one of those! It just made sense.”