By Maricruz Villalobos
Hi! Welcome back to Behind the Lyrics! My name is Maricruz Villalobos and I ask artists to break down their songwriting process and share their inspirations behind the song.
I invited 31 year old singer/songwriter Lauren Luiz to give intel into her song “concussion.” She started writing for her project girlhouse 2 years ago and has developed quite a following. With an eccentric music video to pair with this groovy song she has accumulated over 3 million streams on Spotify.
That woman, hit my Honda Civic
Called me a bitch when she did it
Now I’m spread out on the ground
Fireman can’t hold me down
But I’m questioning and thinking
Of the last time that I think I saw ya
Right away, just into a scene. I wanted something very visual. In that breakup, it was my bottom, I got into a really bad car accident. But like, the next thing that I remember is I'm literally on the ground and I'm blacked out. There's panicking and just like trying to get up. When you are in that situation, you're just like, Okay, this is weird. This is the first time this has happened to me. I'm not thinking about "how is my car? Am I dying?" I'm thinking about "how am I going to explain this story to this guy that I'm obsessed with?" "What do I look like? Am I gonna have scarring?" It was just such a bad relationship. It was so so bad. So that is just literally the story of me getting into that car accident
Right now I can’t think of any killers
That could bury me in silver
That's about a vampire. So when you get buried in silver, that's supposed to cement you in there as a vampire. I kind of felt like I was being obsessive. I was just kind of almost leeching off of this person. That's how it made me feel. I just was like, "Okay, what am I actually doing? Am I being a vampire? Am I just sucking the life out of everybody that's around me?"
You did surgery on my mind
I think about you all the time
And my history calls you a viper
Think I lost something inside ya
That one is your friends telling you that this person sucks. I just felt like I had lost a portion of myself. Whether they had sucked it out of me themselves or "Am I the vampire? Or are they the vampire?" I just couldn't really tell who was leeching off of who.
I think I know you well
I’m something of a kiss and tell
Concussion gives me dizzy spells
That is the disillusionment of being in love with this person. The euphoria feeling of not being awake and not being present, and blaming it on this car accident that I got in. But really, the real concussion came from this relationship that I was in.
I think I set this for a long run
I talk about you now to everyone
In case you haven’t moved on
I felt from that relationship, very broken. Like I couldn't bounce back. That I had damaged myself. The more I talked about this person, the more I was cementing them in my brain. There was no way I was going to come back from that.
When I was driving in Missouri
Someone told me a ghost story
‘bout a man without a face
And that thought haunted me for days
I’m still questioning and thinking
Of the last time that I think I saw ya
Another example of a time that I should have just been focused on this terrifying story that somebody was telling me but I just was thinking about this person. It really doesn't go deeper than that. It was an example of a time that I should have been focused on something else and I was focusing on this person and obsessing. Then the post chorus is…
Dum dum, da da da da da da da
Dum dum, da da da da da da da
Dum dum, da da da da da da da dum
That has lots of emotional meaning particularly for the "doo doops" in my brain because I go "doo doo doop" when I think. I don't really think in words, I just think "doop doop doop."
Listen to the episode below!
You can reach Maricruz Villalobos at maricruv@uci.edu !
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