We are cruel to heartbreak. Even when you realize it was never meant to be, no one can take away the moments, the memories, that unwelcome “forget why you’re crying over it.” moment of “maybe I’m missing them” heartache that you shouldn’t feel. “persona non grata” by Aditi Babel turns a toxic relationship into a gorgeous, haunting pop ballad in which every detail is perfection.
The phrase “ice in the desert” and “salt in a lake” that emerged from the Great Basin Desert gives the song its miserable feeling of being in the wrong place. A poetic way of saying, “you know you have to go, but you can’t seem to leave.”
Babel definitively establishes that visual with the line, “I never thought we’d be stuck in Nevada,” which let me tell you, sounds much better than lines that are trying to be poetic, but have the opposite effect. The desert comes into focus. Somewhere it exists, where good memories get left behind, and leaving is more than just your back.
The piano is unpretentious, more liberated (there’s space for it, it doesn’t smother Babel’s singing or drain the vitality out of the tune) and so lets the strength of the music build rather than flatten out into inept melodrama. The bridge, which shimmers into a sweet little piano waltz, is gorgeous. It rekindles the old happiness, defiantly denouncing the myth that you can’t leave the last partner if they were cracked all along, that sometimes you mourn something that was good once.
That delicate delivery keeps Babel from so much as edging into mawkish territory. Babel’s singing kind of at times enters the ‘cursive style’: while vowels are held out just a little too long at several points, a couple of lines come off a tad clumsy. However, that’s a small quibble in a song so carefully composed otherwise.
There’s nothing particularly novel here in “persona non grata,” nor should there be. The album’s imagery, its tune, its perfect arrangements; there is a special kind of decadent agony when you know you have to leave but still miss what you leave behind. Babel gives it all as much space as he wants to take.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
