Pressing Concerns: Pacing, ‘Real poetry is always about plants and birds and trees and the animals and milk and honey breathing in the pink but real life is behind a screen’

Release date: October 13^th
Record label: Totally Real
Genre: Anti-folk, bedroom pop, singer-songwriter, indie folk
Formats: CD, cassette, digital

There are a number of different ways to pander directly to the person who runs Rosy Overdrive, but one of the most unique ways I’ve encountered would have to be making a three-song EP called Snake Facts where every song title is, indeed, a fact about a snake and the subject matter uses snakes as a jumping-off point for some particularly poignant writing (sample lyric: “Mostly I just want to be left alone / Crawl around in your attic, just waiting to die”). That’s what Katie McTigue, AKA Pacing, did earlier this year, which did indeed get the San Jose-based, Florida-originating singer-songwriter on my radar. Snake Facts also began Tigue’s collaboration with Totally Real Records (Onesie, TIFFY, Snake Lips), the label who is putting out the next Pacing release just a few months later. Real poetry is always about plants and birds and trees and the animals and milk and honey breathing in the pink but real life is behind a screen is the second Pacing full-length, following the 20-minute, 8 song Hatemail “mixtape” last year (and at a dozen songs and nearly reaching the half-hour mark, I don’t think it’d be too out of line to call it a “debut album”).

Real Poetry… is an album well-served by its title, as McTigue’s writing wriggles back and forth between stubbornly conversational and surprisingly poetic throughout its twelve tracks. Musically, McTigue is saddled with the “anti-folk” label, which she’s declined to shake off and embraced to some degree. I certainly would not be surprised to learn that Kimya Dawson was a formative influence on Pacing, but the record’s indie pop structures (while acoustic guitar-based, yes) range from sketched sparsely to keenly orchestrated; I hear the twee-folk of Sidney Gish, the country-rock asides of The Paranoid Style, the DIY showtunes of Smol Data, and the kitchen-sink folk experimentation of Noah Roth throughout Real Poetry… As anyone who’s bought physical Pacing media can attest, McTigue is a multi-disciplinary artist, so to say that her latest album is a “personal” record is to say that questions and musings about art, legitimacy, and presentation of concepts (“real poetry”) float through these songs as much as the typical emotional, interpersonal relationship-based content that gets this tag more frequently.

The way I interpret the album title (which is also the first line of opening track “Bite Me”) is not necessarily a rejection, but a true, open interrogation of the idea it posits about “real poetry” being the domain of “plants and birds and trees” (McTigue references the poem “You Can’t Have It All” by Barbara Ras as inspiration for this on Bandcamp. “I liked the poem, but something about how flowery it is put me into defiance mode,” she writes. “Why are Real Poets [so] obsessed with nature?”). The themes that come up again and again in Real Poetry…–self-referential, recursive, and fourth-wall-agnostic writing, almost ritualistic self-deprecation, emotional and musical whiplash–reflect just how thoroughly Pacing are committed to exploring the reality-curious titular phrase and other, similar questions.

“I Want to Go Outside” and “Live Laugh Love” are, for one thing, two early examples of the musical adventurousness of Pacing, but they’re also populated with lyrics that strike at the heart of the album. “I Want to Go Outside” is a personal look at a reversion to not just nature but the “outside world” more generally (“I might get in a wreck and I’d be paralyzed for the rest of my life, so I’d be stuck in side / Well, I guess that’d be alright,” this is one of the more memorable roadblocks–but hardly the only one–that McTigue discusses here). “Live Laugh Love” is even more of a bullseye, walking the tightrope (or riding the seesaw) between defeatist self-flagellation (“Everything I do is dumb”, “This part of the song is a placeholder / To save myself from saying something stupid”, “This song is dumb”) and defiant defensiveness (“But if you don’t like this song / Why don’t you just rip out my heart?”). The headline-worthy lines in “Live Laugh Love” are all good and I like them, but the most key one to me (and the one that relates a little more directly to the song’s title, I think) is a more subtle one: “It’s too late to be anything but ordinary”.

McTigue follows up “Live Laugh Love” with “Stupid”, a thirty-second acoustic outro reinforcing its title in a way that is definitely overkill (but this is also the point), and when Pacing revisit this seed in the very-real three-minute penultimate track “So Stupid”, there’s a lot of weight added to the title line after McTigue takes a winding highway to get to it. There are plenty of puzzle-piece moments strewn throughout Real Poetry… (I’ll throw some of these out here: “Plastic flowers never fade, but I’m not gonna die in Orangeville,” from “Orangeville”, the various cracks throughout the facade of “Annoying Email”, “None of this counts / In a couple of years, I’m gonna start my life for real,” in “unReal / forReal”) but it’s the title of “So Stupid”, combined with the hanging question at the end of the song, that cements it as the album’s central enigma. It’s a blanket, being “so stupid”–it’s equal parts comforting and obscuring. Kids are stupid, in the same way that fake plastic trees are stupid, talking to yourself is stupid, poetry is stupid, it’s stupid that it’s a hundred and three degrees outside, the infinite, divergent possibilities of the universe are stupid, and the fact that any of us are alive or not alive is stupid. That’s the easy part. But even as Real Poetry… is a record featuring several dispatches from inside this blanket, McTigue’s writing doesn’t stop there. After all, to paraphrase Syndrome from The Incredibles–when everything is stupid, then nothing is.