Who knows what sort of media from our current dark age will last as long as The Odyssey, of course, and if the past is anything to go by, music seems a good deal less sticky than words. And in any case I'm pretty anti-Wagner, so I don't really intend to set the song up as some sort of Gesamtkunstwerk, but this is a post about why "Just Another Girl" by The Killers is a masterpiece.
This is a post in a style I didn't do nearly enough of when Tumblr was young, a close reading of a pop song. We'll get into it a little bit, but I do want to point out right at the start that one of the things that gave (in my opinion) this song—which was released as a new track accompanying their compilation Direct Hits in 2013—staying power late into the 2010s is that it was ever so slightly early to the microtrend of wordless choruses that characterizes late '10s Peak Headphone Jam pop.
I don't have a thinkpiece to point you to, but I'm sure that a more competent cultural critic than I pointed out that choruses mostly lost their vocals in the late 2010s, kind of mimicking the trend away from radio, festivals and such as being the primary source of what makes a song a hit and into the Spotify era. Sitting here on the other side of Covid lockdowns, I'm not sure whether I even know what a smash hit really looks like, but maybe I just need to chill out and put on the radio again.
That's not to say there aren't a bunch of words that are fun to sing that get repeated in this song! But they're pretty clearly a prechorus.
But anyway, far ahead of myself. The song's two verses are orchestrated quite differently and have a very different cadence. The first verse is mostly table-setting, which is reflected in its slower pace and almost lack of guitar.
From even just the line "drive by your house / nobody's home", we can tell this song is about regret after a breakup. Carly Rae Jepsen, noted diva of odd breakup feelings, uses this formulation too in another banger song, "Fever," from Emotion Side B, which I regret to inform you turns 10 years old this year. For Carly the "driving to your house" is a central piece of the lyrics to "Fever," but it isn't part of any plot to "Just Another Girl" really so much as it is calling forth a trope to place the song in a genre as quickly as possible.
However, there are two important clues about the singer given to us in the first verse: "I can feel the cracks in my spirit / I'm starting to bust" and "I'm trying to tell myself that I'm better off alone".
And the prechorus that follows attempts to do more or less that.
All of my friends say I should move on
What I love about this prechorus, which kicks over into the chorus at about "another girl", is the way the musical setting adds a layer of meaning. There's the Brandon singing the song, almost, who dutifully repeats "All of my friends say" with this rising intonation that gives the words a bit of a doubtful feeling. It's this Brandon who sings the second line "She's just another girl..." too. The rest of the prechorus, however is significantly more confident. You could take it to be Brandon being convinced, or channeling the conviction all of his friends have.
Indeed, although the lyrics introduce doubt or disagreement between Brandon and his friends, the music is unambiguous: she is just another girl. "It wasn't meant to be," for example, is given to us over a squarely 00s pop punk bass-lead tension build. "She's just another girl" in the choruses is sung with total conviction.
The second verse shows us what the cracks alluded to before are showing in. Brandon visits a fortune teller. "Maybe this confusion's got me losing my grip," he says, before reporting that his ex's brother is getting married and sent him an invitation.
The lack of reply is really interesting to me. In this verse Brandon cannot confront reality; he goes so far as to see a fortune teller about a breakup. He feels so cut off from his ex's world that he can only drive by her house to see if she's there. In reality, his ex's brother considers him worth a wedding invitation; surely he could actually have the conversation he sort of dictates to his ex.
Instead we see him retreat into fantasy. "I could be reeling them in left and right," he says in the really beautiful minor chord false chorus / first bridge, except that he doesn't want to. "Maybe all of my friends should confront," he says, preemptively throwing back the doubts his friends may raise about his judgment, "the fact that I don't want another girl". The "another girl" part of the line plays again the role it does in starting a chorus and is delivered the same way.
Initially I wasn't really sure what to make of this piece of the line matching the other instances. Of course "another girl" in the "reeling them in" sense is kinda present as a reading, which I don't love but can't really do anything about. But I think maybe a kinder reading has those words echoing in his head a bit. Even if he can't agree that she's just another girl, maybe he can start to see the possibility of another girl.
After the delusion and lashing out of the first bridge, the second bridge reads to me like exactly what all good bridges are: the emotional core of the song.
And why can't I sleep at night?
He's afraid and he feels bad or wrong. Even if he can't quite put it all together yet, he's starting to feel his way toward agreement with the assessment of his friends. None of the questions he asks are answered—I mean, the song's almost over anyway—but they're really the kinds of questions that just need to be asked and heard, more than answered.
More than anything, what I think is maybe the most powerful about the song is how much it is able to hold Brandon's faulty perspective honestly even as it works to correct it. A song about a breakup that is just what his friends say to him about it wouldn't have landed for me, for example, broken up and not willing to move on, when I heard it first. It needs Brandon's real unwillingness to move on even as he says he's trying to get to wanting to.
And somehow, even if what you really feel is "Maybe all of my friends should confront the fact that I don't want another girl", when you're singing along, the most elated part of the song, the line that might help you realize something just because you sing it like you are realizing something is that last one: "she's just another girl".