‘When It’s All Said And Done’ Love Has No Pride
When John Donne penned “Death, be not proud” he sought to diminish man’s fear of death. In essence, to make death less than the scary thing that goes bump in the night as the people of the 1500s believed. Initially, I considered what the poem would read like if we were to replace “death” with “love”, but it didn’t quite land the way I had imagined.
Nevertheless, in love, there is no room for pride. Giveon’s When It’s All Said And Done EP, perfectly illustrates this. Opening the project with the title track’s first line “Not proud I called you for the fifth time” is a pseudo admission that pride and love cannot coexist. However, in the context of the track, Giveon sought to lay frustration and bitterness as the thematic points of departure for this EP. In conversation with Apple Music, he says, “I wanted to open the project with a tone of frustration and kind of more toxic and in denial, because most breakups that I see aren’t a smooth transition like that.”
The track features a conversation with an unknown man wherein Giveon describes that the relationship he was in is over, for real. The unknown man is skeptical, and listening to Giveon’s delivery, understandably so. The track ends in a way that suggests Giveon is trying to convince himself that the relationship has come to close, and if that isn’t the most relatable thing about love, then I can’t say what is.
Followed up by “Still Your Best”, Giveon says what every jaded ex would “Your body knows me, yes / I'm still your best, best, best”. On the one hand, boasting is considered prideful, and in any instance there is no need to taunt your ex-lover’s new relationship by sharing that you will always be the only lover to truly know her. On the other hand, it’s not boasting if it’s true, even if it’s shameful to have to say. Simultaneously, Giveon goads his ex-lover to return to him in mentioning what he’d do if she came back to him. Inviting that type of return would equally require the ex to release their pride and return to the love they know. Toxic? Maybe. But honest? Very much so.
As Snoh Aalegra sings alongside Giveon, crooning about giving into desire, giving in to the fact that the heart wants what it wants. “It’s kind of like a sign that when you’re alone and all your friends leave and you’re done talking all that, like, macho, denial, ego stuff, you still end up calling that person anyway,” Giveon says of the song. Pleading for one more time to enjoy each other’s company is the crux of this single. Prior to this admission from both lovers, Giveon’s character had too much pride to be honest. Choosing to boast of his impact in “Still Your Best” and outright denying that a continuation of the relationship would happen in “When It’s All Said And Done”. “Last Time” is the sort of clandestine acknowledgement that there is still love and desire in a relationship.
In the spirit of honesty, of throwing away one’s pride, Giveon continues with “Stuck On You”. Lyrically, the closing track candidly expresses that the relationship, flawed as it may be, is the only relationship to be in. “Accepting that you’re not really going anywhere and everything that was being said is just fake,” is the basis of this song, according to Giveon.
Throughout this four-track EP, listeners engage the internal back and forth of wanting to be done with a relationship and making peace with still wanting it at the same time. In close, best put by Giveon, many can relate in saying, “It took some time but I realized / You do me wrong, but it feels right / Feels like I'm stuck on you”.
