There’s really a dearth of solo-loving in the world. And, see, I almost regret writing that sentence, knowing the primal reaction it’ll get: that the only way to get some dole out of your solitary desires is to have a dalliance with masturbation. There’s more than one way to get alms out of time by yourself outside of orgasm; but that’s part of our conditioning to silence the disquieting moments of what it’s really like to live within yourself. It’s why the Great American Songbook reads like a case study in co-dependence, with nary enough vertebrae to go around all of its songwriters to make a single backbone.

It’s not even the exploration of love that’s the problem; my favorite band Poliҫa does it all the time. But Channy Leaneagh’s songs still have her distinct person milling about while dragging the millstone of love. And when she decides to divorce herself from it all—to walk solo—the extraction process doesn’t take a Navy SEAL team of drama or a welder to solder her personality, her essence back together.  She simply steps back inside herself.

There are moments in the video for “I Need $” which are just fucking breathtaking. More so for their moody starkness—a great white fucking unicorn in a world that values emotional vomiting—than for sheer drama.  But in those stills of stillness when Leaneagh is lying about on the bed, immersed within herself, the world splits apart and intimacy abounds. There’s more love, more thoughts tracking within her head, more connection to what really makes us human, more real fucking peace in those bed shots than a thousand pleading pop songs on the market today.

I live for those shots of her staring into space, because I live them. I know those glances, because they are mine also and there’s so much power within them. “I Need $” holds within it the unvarnished core of a deeply satisfying solo-loving. Leaneagh and I might not always like what’s in our heads, but songs like “I Need $” give voice to being driven and to how really knowing yourself first is hardly a second best lifelong love affair.
 

 

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