All This Noise When I Need Silence

Tennis “How to Forgive”

There is a voyeuristic quality to Tennis’ music, in that they are a married couple and Alaina Moore seems to mostly sing autobiographical lyrics about her life with her husband and collaborator Patrick Riley. There’s never anything particularly revealing in the lyrics but a song like “How to Forgive,” which is about letting go of anger built up towards a partner, makes me wonder what it’s like to work in this sort of arrangement. It must be odd to work on a song that’s putting you on blast, right? It’s likely this song was written after a conflict was resolved and a lot of things had already been discussed, but it’s still an interesting form of shared catharsis. I suppose it’s also notable that this is not at all an angry song – the music is deliberately sweet and girlish, as if to sugar the pill of negative emotions, and Moore’s lyrics are mostly just her questioning the logic of dwelling on anger. It’s very very conciliatory, and I wonder if that would be the case if the song was not written and performed with her partner.

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