Frances Forever Details

The most popular song on Frances Forever’s Spotify page is titled, in the terse vernacular of the post-millennial digital native, “f--- u.” It begins with a crooning preamble. “I’ve forgotten to breathe, forgotten to read/ Forgotten to tie my shoes/ Forgotten to eat, forgotten to drink/ Because I’m only thinking of you,” Frances sings as she strums a ukulele, her voice compressed and hollow, as though recorded over the phone (or, more likely, in a Voice Memo). And then, a few lines later: “The only rhyme in this song/ Rhymes with ‘you’ and only you.”

It’s a typical lyrical trick for Frances Forever, which is the stage name of the 20-year-old singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Frances Garrett. “f--- u” is melancholy, even melodramatic, and simultaneously aware of this fact. The joke is that Garrett’s infatuation has made her a bad songwriter — which, paradoxically, makes her a good songwriter, funny and self-effacing.