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Garrett’s biggest influences are bedroom pop acts like Clairo and Sidney Gish, young female singer-songwriters who found viral success online with self-produced music that captures, in very different ways, the uncertain haze of young adulthood. Garrett admires her songwriting, though she admits Mitski’s unconventional musicality - her songs’ unexpected chord structures and loopy melodic turns - is a bit beyond her. The stage name "Frances Forever" is a reference to the song "Francis Forever," by Mitski, the queen of poetical indie-pop melancholy. Garrett is on break from Clark University, where she's majoring in music technology this summer, she's employed at a store that sells “alternative lounge furniture,” aka beanbag chairs. We sit in the living room, near the piano where Garrett writes songs and the loom where her mother spins wool. The family lives in a serene neighborhood near the golf course. Garrett tells me this on a recent afternoon when I visit her at her parents' home in Melrose, a suburb north of Boston. “I really think that you shouldn't take yourself too seriously as a songwriter.” “Something that I hate about music these days is, ‘Oh, you can't put that lyric in because that's, like, a joke lyric, that's not serious music,’ ” Garrett says.
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Yet her recognition of the ordinariness of her feelings somehow deepens them. 23.) On "Space Girl," a space metaphor-addled ode to a crush, Garrett sings, “Girl, are you a Cancer/ ‘Cause you make me cry/ When we kiss.” It’s a horoscope reference, which goes with the space theme, but more than anything the lyric speaks to the ironic-yet-heartfelt ethos of queer youth internet culture, where everyone is obsessed with astrology and love is always a little tragic, to an almost performative degree. Garrett, who identifies as pansexual, gently pokes fun at herself by invoking this cliché. (Hence this profile, and Frances Forever's headlining slot at WBUR's CitySpace on Friday, Aug. Though her entry didn't take home the ultimate prize, her band's performance of the original song "Space Girl" was charming enough to win over WBUR's own panel of judges, who were tasked with choosing a standout among the 254 submissions from Massachusetts. Those qualities are on display in the video Garrett submitted to the most recent iteration of NPR Music's Tiny Desk Contest. The joke is that Garrett’s infatuation has made her a bad songwriter - which, paradoxically, makes her a good songwriter, funny and self-effacing. “f- u” is melancholy, even melodramatic, and simultaneously aware of this fact. It’s a typical lyrical trick for Frances Forever, which is the stage name of the 20-year-old singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Frances Garrett. And then, a few lines later: “The only rhyme in this song/ Rhymes with ‘you’ and only you.” “I’ve forgotten to breathe, forgotten to read/ Forgotten to tie my shoes/ Forgotten to eat, forgotten to drink/ Because I’m only thinking of you,” Frances sings as she strums a ukulele, her voice compressed and hollow, as though recorded over the phone (or, more likely, in a Voice Memo). The most popular song on Frances Forever’s Spotify page is titled, in the terse vernacular of the post-millennial digital native, “f- u.” It begins with a crooning preamble. This story is part of The ARTery’s ongoing Sound On series, highlighting rising local musicians.
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(Courtesy of the artist) This article is more than 2 years old. Frances Garrett, who performs as Frances Forever.