I used to be a huge fan of Michelle Branch in high school and college but not so much anymore. She keeps saying a new album is coming out but then it never does. It’s been that way for three years now. And yeah, I know that sometimes it’s out of the artists control but she could at least give updates instead of leaving fans in the dark.
Anyways, Michelle teamed up with friend Jessica Harp and formed The Wreckers in 2005. In May of 2006 they released an album, Stand Still Look Pretty, which was a little more country-focused than her previous pop-rock albums. Some of the songs still had that rock sound and so older fans may have been able to adapt to her new tracks.
Certain songs for me were pretty easy to adapt to, especially when it felt like the lyrics described me or something in my life. That’s the case for the song I chose today, the title track, which I listened to a lot around my junior year of college.
In my opinion, the lyrics generally describe a person who is unhappy with herself (low self-esteem) and has many regrets. Sometimes it’s even haunting, enough to keep her up at night. She is dissatisfied with the direction her life has headed. At the same time though, she’s not trying to play the victim – she knows there are a lot of other people in the world with even worse problems. There’s this other person though who never has to deal with those things and so they don’t really understand her.
During this time in my life, I was getting close to a guy I had known for a couple years. The chorus of the song reminded me of him because it reflected my thoughts & the things I might have said. “I am slowly falling apart, I wish you’d take a walk in my shoes for a start and you might think its easy being me. You just stand still, look pretty.”
He was someone who never really took a walk in anyone else’s shoes to know what it felt like. He was a popular musician and at the time, a lot of girls liked him. In other words, he never felt the loneliness or had the self esteem issues I had. All he would have to do is stand there and smile and that would be it. That’s all he would ever have to do. So there you have it.
