Then she connects it to her genuine feeling of dread about friends dying, and then connects that to the immediate concern: “My mom’s sick / She’s in a hospital bed”. The song opens with a startling image as she recounts a dream of a baby drowning. “My Mom” is a stunning example of both that uniqueness and the emotional power. But the songs are especially distinct, and especially direct. Remember That I Love You, her fifth album, has a fairly unadorned, solitary atmosphere, especially compared to the everybody-sings communal feeling of her last album, Hidden Vagenda. Her idiosyncratic songwriting style seems more fully developed with each album. It’s music that’s unique in the way people are unique: her songs seem inextricably linked to their creator. And the cadence of her singing can be unusual, especially the way she fits the words to the melodies. Kimya Dawson does not have the voice of a typical pop singer - her voice is brittle, she often sounds like she’s about to cry. As she puts it in the song “The Competitions”, “I sang and sang and sang / About how crappy I felt / Not realizing how many other people would relate”. And that singing songs to make other people feel better, to help them overcome their own hardships, is what music is all about. It’s anger turned into optimism, and you trust that the latter is 100% genuine because you trust that the former is, because she gives the impression of absolute honesty, that this is her life and her deepest emotions that she’s singing about. She takes the absolute hardest, darkest side of life and turns it into songs that tilt in a completely positive, embrace-every-moment direction. But there’s no one who handles them quite the way that Kimya does. Anger at the deaths of friends, extreme depression about one’s own circumstances: these are the building blocks of a million songs. Anyone who’s heard any of her first four albums knows that her songs are built from the hurt caused by personal traumas and losses. That sentiment might seem like hyperbole or play-acting in someone else’s hands, but not hers.
“I will lose my shit if even one more person I know dies / So please don’t die”, Kimya Dawson sings on “My Mom”, two songs into her new album, Remember That I Love You.
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