“The right way to play it”: The Wolf Alice song that made Ellie Rowsell cry
Like many masterful acts of rock in the 21st century, Wolf Alice has a knack for spotlighting the ambiguities of life’s more downbeat emotions and experiences. While it may feel easy to shoehorn some of their best tracks into songs about sadness or joy, the true beauty within their discography arrives from the spaces in between, when things feel a little hazier than simple descriptions.
For instance, across all three studio albums, frontwoman Ellie Rowsell has covered almost everything from joy and euphoria to heartbreak and emotional malaise. Many of these pillars exist in their most popular tracks, from the paranoid undertone of ‘Don’t Delete The Kisses’ to the mental anguish throughout ‘Silk’. Even ‘Bloom Baby Bloom’ exudes a palpable emotional catharsis they’ve been working to master since My Love Is Cool.
Perhaps one of the most intriguing facets of Wolf Alice’s appeal is not only the ambiguity of some of the emotions and lyrics but also the ambiguity of the arrangements and melodies. After all, this is a band with an intricate knack for hiding deeper meanings within songs, presenting them as joyous or uplifting soundscapes, often with darker or melancholic threads beneath the surface.
For Blue Weekend, the band sought to build upon all of the intricacies previously explored with Visions of a Life, though with more directional purpose that established them as well-versed players in the never-ending spiral of life, love, resilience, and loss. Among these heartfelt tapestries was ‘No Hard Feelings’, a song that initially started as something reflective of a formulaic Ronettes-esque song until Rowsell slowed it down to make it more emotionally impactful.
Inspired by the moment you reach at the end of a relationship when sadness becomes replaced with a more resigned acceptance, or, as Rowsell put it, “What’s the point of being miserable about it?”, ‘No Hard Feelings’ is a sweetly sentimental track filled with soft reflections and hopeful observations. “No hard feelings, honey,” Rowsell sings, “There’ll be no bad blood. Losing your love has been hard enough.”
While it’s easy to let the song take you to a place of sorrow, Rowsell recalled the first time they played the song in its new arrangement, and how it had made her cry because of the impact of playing it at a slower pace. “The first time we played in this formation it made me cry,” she told Apple Music. “Which isn’t hard, to be honest, but felt like a good indicator that we’d found the right way to play it.”
Beyond the soft sway of the arrangements, hearing the lyrics in the new rhythm likely struck a chord with Rowsell, too. After all, the song recalls navigating the varying perils of the breakup, like listening to Amy Winehouse’s ‘Love Is A Losing Game’ while crying in the bathtub, before arriving at a more peaceful place when everybody’s a winner: “For everything that ends, something else must begin.”
While Rowsell wished she could have made the song longer, its bittersweetness makes it even more resonant, reflecting the kind of uplifting observations made at a moment’s notice, but which feels never-ending when you’re in the crux of it. At its core, it passes by in the blink of an eye, but, like most tragic romances, it leaves an imprint on the heart for a lifetime.
