Song & Story Vol. 2: Autumn Is A Killer x Our Missing Hearts

When a singer or a writer wants to break your heart, they make it impossible to look away.

I want to show you two artists doing exactly that—one with sounds, one with sentences—reaching for opposite tools to pull off the same feat.

Start with the song. Sarah Defne Gray sings a breakup in an impossibly tender voice, almost restrained, right up until: Was it cold that night in your backseat, with her on top of you? On that last word, “you”, she breaks into a vocal run that sounds like the beginning of a cry, like she’s losing control.

But there’s video of the session, and she’s completely composed. She chose to break there. Her voice fractured, came apart, and she placed it precisely on the word that carried the most emotional weight. You can’t look away, because she’s holding your face to the most painful word in the song.

Then the story. In Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng writes a boy, Bird, watching an old man be humiliated in a shop while his own father pretends not to see. Like an expert camerawoman, Ng holds your attention: he can only look and look: at the old man… at the pizza guy… at his father… She won’t let you look away. She pans across each body in turn—the old man braced for a blow, the oil-spotted shirt, the father performing an ordinary day that is not at all ordinary—and you have to witness everyone, in order, the way Bird has to.

The prose is a camera, and Ng is holding you still.

Gray holds you by breaking, losing composure, on purpose, so the sound seizes you. Ng holds you by refusing to break. The prose stays perfectly, unbearably calm while a child watches cruelty. One artist weaponizes losing control. The other weaponizes keeping it. Wielding opposite tools, they get the same result: at the exact moment you want to turn away, they make it impossible to do so.

What’s a song or a story that did this to you? I’m always collecting them.