idle() the music of ipe()

No. 23· behind-the-music

Who Speaks in the Ten Titles?

In dear(you); vol.1, "You" opens every even-numbered title from track 04, "I" opens two titles, and the only "us" arrives at track 09. We count the pronouns.

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An earlier entry, Ten Titles, Read as Sentences, read the ten titles of dear(you); vol.1 by tense. This entry asks a smaller question about the same ten lines: who is speaking, and to whom? We count only the words written in the titles. We did not read the lyrics for this entry and we measured nothing in the recordings. The music is made with AI (Suno); the lyrics are drafted by AI and reviewed by a person.

The pronouns, title by title

#TitlePronoun in the title
01Hard Day Again, Wasn't It?it
02It's Okay, Take Your Time.it, your
03I Was Scared, Too.I
04You're Still Shining.you
05It's Okay to Rest a While.it
06You're Not Alone.you
07I'm Glad You're Here.I, you
08You Were Enough Today.you
09Let's Smile a Little Tomorrow.us (in "let's")
10You Did So Well Today.you

We count a contraction as one word and a form of "you" (you, you're, your) as "you". With those rules, six of the ten titles contain "you", three contain "it", two contain "I", and one contains "us". Titles 02 and 07 contain two pronouns each, which is why the counts add up to twelve, not ten.

Where each word sits

Look at the first word of each title, and a pattern shows up that the table hides:

  • Tracks 04, 06, 08 and 10 all begin with "You". That is every even-numbered track from 04 to the end.
  • Tracks 03 and 07 begin with "I" ("I Was Scared, Too." and "I'm Glad You're Here.").
  • Tracks 01, 02 and 05 begin with the situation rather than a person: "Hard Day Again", "It's Okay" and "It's Okay to Rest".
  • Track 09, "Let's Smile a Little Tomorrow.", is the only title that begins with "let's", the only one that proposes something to do together.

Track 07 is the one title where "I" and "you" share a sentence. Title 02 is the other title with two pronouns, "it" and "your", and it is the only one that mixes the situation with a direct address.

The first person is rare

Only two titles speak about the speaker, and both do it in a plain way: one confesses a feeling in the past, the other states a feeling in the present. Eight titles never mention "I" at all. If you read the album top to bottom as one conversation, most of it is spent on the listener, not on the person singing.

What we do not claim

  • We do not claim this was planned. The design documents give each song its own purpose; none of them describes a pronoun pattern, and we are reading the pattern off the finished titles.
  • We do not say how a listener hears the pattern, and we have not run listening tests.
  • Titles are only one line per song. The lyrics may use other pronouns, and this entry says nothing about them.

You can check the count yourself on the album list on the idle() home page. Read the ten titles aloud and listen for where "you" begins to open each line.

Read together