CMAT has released her first single of 2021. ‘I Don’t Really Care For You’ is the fourth single from Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson and the musician says it is a bop about “realising that everybody can be bad person.”
The song is a variation on the theme of CMAT’s debut single ‘Another Day (KFC)’, where our protagonist is pre-occupied with a failed relationship. This time the ex has told her ‘I don’t really care for you,” but there’s a parallel in how CMAT continues to mentally examine the relationship.
“Oh the Marian Keyes of it all / rewriting everything I do,” she sings as she sips a Bacardi Breezer to a bright country-flecked full-band arrangement.
CMAT addresses the ex and chastises her own role in the relationship with her typically razor-sharp lyric-writing – “I just spent seven hours looking at old pics of me / trying to pinpoint where the bitch began / Somewhere after the Passion of Christ and before I had an Instagram.”
But really, her behaviour, or perceived behaviour, is a reflection on how it ended abruptly – “all you did was hurt yourself / and let me take the blame / I loved you like a mirror so I guess. I’ve done the same.”
Like the devastating line in ‘I Wanna Be A Cowboy Baby!’ where she says “wanna stop relying on men who are bigger than me,” here, our hero cries “why did I have to co-depend on another old man? / I see how that has left me in the past.”
It’s a cutting line that rings through with regret and pathos – and those are feelings that CMAT has proved she is capable of expressing in a myriad of ways in her nascent career.
Buy the song on Bandcamp / or elsewhere.
The songs released so far are being packaged on the 12″ EP Diet Baby available here.
“It’s about realising you were ultimately the bigger dickhead in a relationship. I was thinking about how superiority always insists upon itself. Good people will always think they were doing the right thing in the moment, even if their actions are terrible. I try really hard to be a good person, but I still end up being a big bully sometimes. If you ever find yourself saying something along the lines of, ‘I would love him IF…’ or ‘I would stay with you IF…’ then… you’re probably being a dickhead“
“Musically, I went to my producer Oli with the vague concept of, ‘What if this song was ABBA doing a spaghetti western soundtrack?’ and he just knocked it out of the park. I was also listening to loads of Charley Pride around that time – and the backing vocals in the pre-chorus are directly inspired by him. Rest In peace king!”
CMAT
