She & Him – ‘Take It Back’

It’s now official; Zooey Deschanel is the biggest heartbreaker in the world. In case you didn’t watch her lay waste to Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 500 Days Of Summer, you can now see it happen IRL with today’s announcement that she’s leaving her indie-rock husband and Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard with the wilting flowers on the doorstep after only two years. Forget the Kardashian split, this is the one everyone should worry about. Because if average-looking guys can’t make it work with girls who are next level beautiful on the basis of their undeniable talent alone, the rest of us are all doomed. But I saw the writing on the wall a long time ago, when Zooey started venturing into the one area that her partner had more points in than her; singing. She’s been at it on screen for almost a decade, not to mention her side projects like this one. Perhaps the worst part of all of it is that she’s really good at it. She is, essentially, the ultimate woman. Talk about 500 days of bummer.

It’s terrible that on an album full of pleasantries I gravitated towards the saddest song, but like a true actress, Deschanel sings best when she has some drama to compel her to. ‘Take It Back’ sounds like a jazz standard, no doubt due to the exquisite musical styling of the ‘Him’ in the equation, M.Ward, who has released bucketloads of exquisitely unhappy alternative country music in the past and collates it all into the ultimate template for his blue-eyed foil here. It’s quite remarkable to hear how Deschanel hits the three opening notes of her melody, all of which are the same pitch but are attacked differently. Not many people do that anymore. As those strings murmur violently underneath the added-note piano chords, you can actually hear the internal dialogue happening before it’s been explained in song. It also seems as though, like the great sirens of yesteryear, Zooey is dictating the tempo of the piece before it begins properly, a technique called rubato which is something I conveniently managed to avoid reading whenever I saw it on sheet music in my school orchestra. Do you know that that means? It means you can’t remix this, even if you wanted to. The BPM only settles around the fifty second mark, by which point you’ve lost the best part of the song. And yes, of course the lyrics are timely, but you can read anything into anything retrospectively:

Take it back, take it back
I don’t want your lovin’ anymore
Let me live, let me live,
It’s not you I sing for.

Zooey, often unfairly compared to Katy Perry both in looks and generally positive outlook, proves her mettle on this devastating bluesy number. When she swoons “I know all of your tricks” damn straight do you believe her. Ward, who sits delicately behind the voice and subtly pushes the 6/8 figure into something you’d want to waltz to in a bar when they started putting the chairs up and wiping down the tables, has these amazing slide guitar mini-solos that really colour the piece. It’s easy to see why the two chose to collaborate together, throughout Volume I the musical sensitivity on display is uncanny – it’s almost like you’re listening to one person, not two. So while it must suck to be Ben Gibbard today, at least he’s got this great body of work to remember his future ex-wife by.

We should all be so lucky.

She & Him – ‘Take It Back’