Things I Do

Andy Shauf builds songs like a set designer: each detail placed with care, each character lit from a specific angle, the emotional machinery running just beneath the surface where you can feel the heat but not quite see the mechanism. The instrumentation here is chamber-pop in its instincts — woodwinds threading through the arrangement like thoughts interrupting thoughts, a rhythm section keeping steady time underneath what feels like barely contained unraveling. Shauf's voice is clean and slightly removed, a kind of studied neutrality that somehow makes the confessional content more devastating rather than less. He sings about the small, embarrassing, repetitive ways people undermine their own happiness — the habitual gestures that accumulate into a personality, the things we do not because we want to but because we've forgotten how to stop. His gift is specificity without sentimentality: he describes behavior precisely enough that you recognize it without feeling accused. This is Toronto indie pop with a theatrical sensibility, part of the tradition of narrative songwriting that understands character study as a form of empathy. There's something of the midcentury pop songwriter in the arrangement — sophisticated, slightly melancholy, elegantly constructed — but the subject matter is entirely contemporary in its self-awareness. Put it on when you're in the kind of mood where you want a mirror that doesn't flinch.