Am I Wry? No
by Mew

Album: Half the World Is Watching Me (2000)
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Songfacts®:

  • Mew is a Danish band known for their unusual melodies and inscrutable lyrics. Those melodies come first, with words layered to fit. This song tells a very vague story of a girl named Farrah, who among other things, drives with her eyes closed.
  • In a Songfacts interview with lead singer Jonas Bjerre, he explained how this song came about. "I came up with this simple baritone riff," he said. "And Bo [Madsen] came up with this really cool counterpart for it, so it was kind of a call-and-answer thing - just the guitars. I always thought that felt like the chorus, and everyone else in the band thought what I thought was the verse was the chorus. But it was a really cool song and had this nice modulation in the outro, where it goes somewhere else. But there was something in the middle that was kind of hard.

    It was an awkward song, because it had the rhythmical changes and the chord structure changes were awkward. Something we do often is when we find something that feels awkward, instead of giving up on it, we force it to work somehow. So, we kept at it, and again, I had this thing where the bridge part had this almost celestial string part that comes in. And when I was running that backwards, it became this other melody that I am then singing. It's almost like a mirror that meets at the end: one part stays on, and then it meets its own mirror, and then turns backwards again. I don't know how apparent that is in the song, but it was what it needed to fit it together with the rest of the song."

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