Thick Skin

from A Quiet Year by Agnes Milewski

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about

I wrote Thick Skin about a month before the first lockdown in 2020. It was early spring, a cold day, and I was sitting on the floor with my guitar tuned to some weird exotic tuning, thinking about the year that’s just past, but not being able to write anything. I felt numb and hollow and everything I wrote felt wrong. I also thought that the world hadn’t been okay for a long time, even before the pandemic hit us all like a slap in the face. (Little did we know what’s next…)
In fact, the world seemed like it was spinning more and more out of control even then. With the impending climate catastrophe, some parts of the world on fire, other parts under water, conflicts and wars closing in on us, people fleeing their homes due to those conflicts, the climate crisis, or both. There were whispers of some new strange disease in Asia, plus a general feeling of the media, politics, and every person you know slowly losing it. Emotions boiling over, empathy getting lost through social media - it was like a competition of who can scream the loudest, even if they have nothing to say.. All that tied in with my own personal emotions, already existing anxieties and insecurities: being a woman, a female musician in a male-dominated world, an immigrant, the child of a toxic parent. I talked to a friend, and they said was: „Girl, you better grow some thick skin if you wanna survive.“
Now, how do I do that? I replied.
I didn’t know how to. I felt genuinely lost. How could you grow a thick skin when every day seems to chafe away that little bit of resilience you’ve built up?
I felt like I needed some structure to hold on to.
So I wrote it all down like I would write a technical report. In an excel sheet. I was documenting the last doings of mankind.
Then I got drunk and forgot about it.
A few days later, I looked at the sheet, and I saw a rhythm and patterns in the words emerge right before my eyes. I took my guitar, and the music just started pouring out of me. The song was finished in twenty minutes.
I decided that this would be the first song on my next album.

lyrics

Thick Skin

This hasn't been
A quiet year
I've been documenting the last doings
Of mankind

The pain we caused
And left behind
Those who needed us the most
It seems
Are banished from our minds

We drank a cup of bitterness
Tried to fill that emptiness somehow

They say that I
Have to grow
Much thicker skin
But don't you know
It's thinner every day.

So I drink a cup of bitterness
That will grow some hair on your chest
They say

Sometimes it seems
This is the end
What was in your hand
Now slips through you
Like grains of sand.

The towers of hate
And walls you've built
They now seem to crack
Under the weight of
Your own guilt

They say that I
Have to grow
Much thicker skin
But don't you know
It's thinner every day.

credits

from A Quiet Year, track released April 22, 2022
Music and lyrics written by Agnes Milewski
produced by Ryan McCambridge
Agnes Milewski: Vocals, Acoustic Guitar
Mia Heck: Violins
Walter Till: Bass
Rodi Mestrih: Drums
Eddie McLachlan: Electric Guitars

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Agnes Milewski Vienna, Austria

Vienna based Agnes Milewski is the perfect artist for the post genre world, happier to be hopping generic boundaries and subverting expectation than nailing her colours to any one stylistic mast. She wanders through the same plaintive piano soundscapes as Tori Amos and the more commercially friendly end of the Kate Bush heyday as easily as she delivers an alt-folk vibe or a haunted pop atmosphere. ... more

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