Don’t You Dare Pity Me

Margaret Glaspy “Situation”

It feels strange that I haven’t heard more songs about resenting unsolicited advice in all these years. Margaret Glaspy’s guitar parts in “Situation” are wiry and tense, and seem to tangle around the melody like string becoming a knot. She doesn’t sing so much as spit out her words, and the lines are blunt, confrontational, and completely unambiguous: “You don’t know my situation / we’ve had at most one conversation / you haven’t got a clue / so don’t tell me what to do.” It’s a perfect little dagger of a song aimed at the neck of some condescending even if potentially well-meaning person who doesn’t have the self-awareness to realize how insulting they’re being. When I hear it, I wonder how often I’ve been that person, and feel guilty for it. I can’t imagine what this song must feel like for the person Glaspy wrote it about. You just know they’ve heard it and felt the sting of recognition, right?

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