“Soft boy scam”: The lyric that The Big Moon wish they had written
Even the most successful artists experience envy. No matter how many hits a musician has to their name, how many awards they’ve collected and how many fans they have won across the globe, there will always be songs penned by other musicians that evoke jealousy. Hearing a poignant lyric or a catchy melody can leave a fellow songwriter wondering how and why they didn’t come up with it first, and London-born indie band The Big Moon are no stranger to this feeling.
The Big Moon singer and songwriter Juliette Jackson has penned her fair share of beautiful lyrics. The indie rock outfit’s catalogue is full of warm guitars and ethereal imagery, the latter contributed by their frontwoman. “Lately, I’ve been fine floating away,” she sings on one of the band’s biggest songs, ‘Your Light’, “Got so out of touch, I started to levitate.” On ‘Daydreaming’, she promises, “You’re the wind blowing through my mind, whatever I cared about before this don’t mean a thing to me now.”
Jackson certainly harbours bucket-loads of talent when it comes to songwriting, but that hasn’t protected her from feeling envious of the writings of others. There is one line, in particular, that the Big Moon singer wishes she had come up with first. When she was prompted to provide a lyric she wished she had written during a conversation with The Courier, Jackson elected to shout out fellow guitar enthusiast Quinnie.
“One I heard recently that I liked,” Jackson responded, “‘No amount of nail polish could make you a good man’ by Quinnie.” The lyric comes from quinnie’s track ‘man’, which investigates the scam of the soft boy over sparse keys and layered harmonies. “So, fuck all your gold stars, the cherries in the backyard, no amount of sugar could sweeten such a bitter heart,” the New Jersey-based artist sings.
The line Jackson envied in particular seems to push into the stereotypical idea and aesthetic of the “soft boy,” which emerged online a couple of years back. The idea of the soft boy usually applied to quirky, tote bag-wielding, Mac Demarco-loving men who, on the surface, seemed trustworthy and in touch with their emotions, but were really just as bad as the rest of them.
Another defining feature of “soft boys” was painted nails, which Quinnie seems to suggest aren’t as much of a green flag as they might have once seemed. “And fuck your soft boy scam, the cowboy or the Tarzan,” she sings over increasingly dense instrumentation, “No amount of nail polish could paint you as a good man.”
The lyric, which featured on Quinnie’s 2023 album Flounder, certainly captures a moment and a trend within modern dating, critiquing it as well as including some clever wordplay in the inclusion of “painting”. It also calls back to an earlier line in its opening, “No amount of…,” flowing easily with the rest of the song. It’s simple but effective, so it’s easy to see why Jackson was envious of it.
In the same way, Jackson has penned a huge number of songs with lyrics that other songwriters will pore over in envy. Just as Quinnie’s work might have inspired her to push her lyric writing further, Jackson’s work with The Big Moon will, in turn, inspire new budding songwriters to pick up a pen.
