Waltz 2 (XO)

The waltz meter announced in the title is present but destabilized — the three-four time is felt as much as counted, slightly lurching under a piano-led arrangement that sounds at once nostalgic and corroded. Smith's production on this track, like much of XO, borrows the sonic vocabulary of late-sixties pop — strings, clean piano, vocal harmonies — and uses it to deliver something fundamentally darker, so that the sweetness of the arrangement functions almost as irony, or as armor. His voice is close-miked and intimate, a near-whisper that makes the listener lean in, and there is a resignation embedded in the delivery that never tips into self-pity, which is one of Smith's most difficult and singular achievements. The lyric concerns the exhausted navigation of a toxic intimacy, the XO of the album title — hugs and kisses that coexist with damage — and the particular emotional paralysis of caring about someone who makes it very hard to be cared for. There is nothing cathartic in the arrangement; it offers no crescendo of release. The song simply turns over and over on its themes the way a sleepless mind does. Culturally it sits at the center of a late-nineties confessional songwriting tradition that Smith both defined and transcended, and it resonates most in the small hours, when ordinary sadness feels too large for ordinary words.