favorite crime

"favorite crime" closes SOUR by refusing the album's own logic: after ten tracks of blaming him, Rodrigo turns the knife inward and calls herself an accomplice. The arrangement is the sparest on the record — a fingerpicked acoustic guitar, a shaker's dry pulse, and then the masterstroke, a cathedral of stacked wordless harmonies that rise behind her like a conscience with reverb. Those layered oohs are pure Jeff Buckley-by-way-of-bedroom-pop, and they carry the track's ache more than the lyric does. Her voice here is delicate, close-mic'd, almost fragile, with breath audible between phrases. The central conceit — a getaway-driver metaphor where she knowingly wrecked herself for him, "the sound of the sirens" made into something she'd choose again — is the record's most sophisticated writing, because it grants her own complicity without surrendering the hurt. Under two and a half minutes, it ends the album on complication rather than catharsis. Culturally it's the deep cut that fans insist is the best song, which is usually a sign that it is. Play it walking home alone after seeing them out, or last in a late-night queue when you've stopped wanting to be right and just want to admit what you did for someone.