Intern

"Intern" opens MY WOMAN as a deliberate misdirection — a synthesizer ballad from an artist known for guitars, arriving cold and spare like a transmission from an empty room. The arrangement is almost nothing: a single warm analog keyboard patch, faint atmospheric decay, and Olsen's voice pushed close to the microphone with a slight ghostly double. That restraint makes every syllable count. Her delivery is weary and floating, none of the belt she deploys later on the record, closer to a lullaby sung to herself. The lyric is a small masterpiece of self-aware fatigue: doesn't matter who you are or what you do, still gotta wake up and be somebody — the artist's fantasy of glamour reduced to labor, love reduced to a job you keep showing up for. Naming it "Intern" makes the joke sting: even romance has a hierarchy and she's at the bottom of it. As an album opener it functions like a curtain, establishing the record's central concern — the exhausting performance of being a woman, and an artist, in public — before the guitars arrive. It's a song for the moment right before you get out of bed, when you know exactly what the day requires and can't quite believe it.