Lyrically Speaking: CMAT explores the complex mind of the artist on ‘Janis Joplining’
“I’m a writer, I don’t do crushes, I do problematic attentions,” CMAT admits at the start of ‘Janis Joplining’, the closing number on Euro-Country.
It’s a classic case of CMAT’s sharp wit with a title that is both funny and says a lot. Referencing the iconic yet tragic singer, Janis Joplin, it touches on her legacy before the opening avant-garde piano has even begun. Recalling how the singer was under-appreciated during her lifetime and then celebrated after, or how the music industry feels to bury her with insults and cruel treatment, it’s a nod to outsider women and the power in them.
But also, as Joplin’s songs so often felt like emotional purges as she wailed her way through confessional tracks of love, lust, heartbreak, rage and beyond, it’s a nod to artistry as catharsis. Put those two sides together and you get a complex image. You get an image of how art can heal and also hurt, how the act of emotional outpouring can be powerful but also become damaging when suddenly the artist is left mining themselves for feelings, or blowing their life up just to have something to sing on the stage.
That’s what CMAT is getting at here with this meandering track led by her most unique instrumentation yet. Throwing out any semblance of who CMAT is or supposed to be, abandoning her big, boisterous country pop star persona, she instead steps into something more niche and nuanced to suit the conversation.
Opening first with an acknowledgement of her role as a writer, this is a track about love and obsession, but through that specific lens. It asks how a person can be healthy and handle things well when their work essentially requires them not to. “I’m Janis Joplining anyway / So come to my hotel,” she sings, pleading for someone to join her during an artistic crash out worthy of an icon’s legacy.
But at the same time, there’s a plea for relief. “Please become my head and my body, oh please just for the night,” she wails with her finest Joplin power behind it all. Begging for a moment of peace away from the mind of an artist, a mind that is constantly analysing and rewriting and looking for stories and telling them, a mind that would obsess over anything just to be able to sing about something, ‘Janis Joplining’ is also the desperate desire for a day off from it.
Then it all snaps back. Just like Joplin crashing out at the Chelsea Hotel before being wrapped in her furs and told to get on the Woodstock stage regardless, CMAT sings “I’ll make us country anyway” as if she’s remembering what she’s supposed to be doing and who she’s supposed to be dressed up as – taking the emotional tumult of this complex connection and her even more complex desire for it, and vowing to turn it into the kind of song she’s supposed to be writing, not this wonky avant garde stuff.
