Big For You by Zsela
by Lana Fleischli
When I listen to an album, I like to sit on it. I like to give myself time to feel it and understand it. I think that makes sense. This time was different. I was at my job today and I saw an email from my mom. It was just a Spotify link and the header said “I think you’ll like this”. I click the link and find myself swept up into Zsela’s Big For You. I listened to it three times through in one sitting.
Now I did mean it when I said that I like to let it simmer. Against my better judgement, I should probably have sat on this one as well. However, I also think there is such thing as over-thinking– obviously. I do tend to overthink music because I worry that I won’t capture the main ideas. But here I am in bed and I’m feeling like writing about this piece because it stuck with me all day. Did I understand the complexities in a day? No! But I don’t need to.
I can sit here and confidently say that Big For You is a beautiful album because it is poetry. Songs are poetry, but Zsela wrote this album as poems, not as songs– or at least that’s how I see it. I listened to the album a few times through, and then I read all of the lyrics. They are something I could hear not only as a song, but as a spoken art piece.
Her deviation from the “normal” song structure is what makes this album stand out. The song titled “Now Here You Go” is, in total, twelve lines. It is abstract in a sense. Where there are themes throughout the album of love and blindsidedness, the power of the album comes with Zsela’s avant-garde writing style.
She plays with the normalized song structure as well as ignores it altogether. In some songs, she includes all of the pieces of the song but makes them each a bit different from each other. The only way I can properly distinguish a “chorus” in “Not Your Angel” is because there is a section that repeats, but sonically, it sounds more like a bridge (until you get to the bridge). In my opinion, the verse sounds like a chorus, but never repeats exactly the same. I love that about the song. Even while playing around with song structure, Zsela still manages to make it original, and able to create a song that is both sonically and lyrically fascinating.