when i first started listening to penelope scott in december of 2021, i gravitated towards the songs off of her album public void, inhaling and living in the angst of tracks like "cigarette aheago" and "feel better". right now i think the song i relate to the most from her entire discography is "hammerhead"1 off of the junkyard 2. unlike its sucessor which dropped the piano and acoustic strings for punchy chiptune production, i feel that junkyard is more raw. i feel much closer to penelope when listening to this one, and for good reason. apart from the instrumentation, the topics of the songs are much more personal than what we get in any of her other records. she speaks on depression (specifically how horrifyingly samey things can become), substance abuse, manipulative relationships, suicide, the lie that is romantic love, and the evils of capitalism. it's pretty impossible not to be a complete emotional wreck after first listening to this album and some tracks still punch me in the gut every time i listen (looking at you, "montreal").
anyways, "hammerhead", an acoustic guitar ballad about the need to get away above all else in particular is so me:
well sharks are spiky if you pet them one way
smooth, you pet the other
and my mom said that if they stop moving they'll die
hammerheads swim past
i've got my face up against the glass
as i whisper to my sisters "as will i"
i've never really felt attached to myself (recently i realized that i've never been happy with my appearance and also because of gender dysphoria and depression, i've gone days at a time not feeling like myself), much less to the place where i live. i think moving some 500 miles away from where i spent the majority of my life was one of the best things that could've ever happened to me2. i'm obsessed with being in a new place and i want to be in a million other new places. i spent my last summer (i didn't have an internship or summer job, i'm not just like penelope unfortunately) driving around part of the country and going to smash ultimate tournaments, trying to find happiness in other people and new places. and my god did it kinda work. the people i got to know better and the people i met make me incredibly happy and i look forward to seeing them all again. i have lovely friends in north carolina and southern virginia, in alabama and in florida and georgia and it's all because of this silly little "fighting game" where minecraft steve is by far the best character.
back to "hammerhead" though, i feel absolutely no need to stay in one place for any extended amount of time. i was a year into uni thinking about transferring to a school in new england or michigan just to be somewhere different. my soul is floating, wandering, it wants to be free. it wants to be where no one has ever seen it. it wants to be new. this might just be able to be boiled down to The Transgender Urge to change. it is true that my big move came at the perfect time for me and my transition, moving to a much more progressive area and away from everyone who knew me in high school. my deadname was actually dead. i was free to socially transition very soon after it hit me that i needed to. the truth is the origin of the urge doesn't matter nearly as much as the fact that it now exists. i want to see the west coast. i want to see africa. i want to see asia, oceania, central and south america. i wish there were a million trillion versions of me and they could all exist at the same time finding new little places and building new relationships.
the one me will have to do for now i guess. i'll go to mexico or canada just to get away from here. and eventually i'll want to get away from there too.
1: don't get me wrong, this song is also edgy and angsty for no apparent reason too. the line "...just for the fleeting joy i get from adding more smoke to the sky" feels great to sing along to but i have to acknowledge that it's at least a little corny.
2: originally one of the first things i wanted to write for an audience to actually read was a piece about my experience moving and how being trans made it so much better. it kinda got melded into this short writing and lives on thru it.