Cinnamon

Some songs announce their subject. "Cinnamon" does the opposite. It arrives as a shimmer of guitar, an easy shuffle, and a voice pitched somewhere between a murmur and a sigh. You could hum along for three and a half minutes without noticing that the song is about the hardest kind of self-knowledge: recognizing a habit that hurts you, and not being able to stop.

It is the fourth of eight tracks on Dry Food, the 2015 debut album by Palehound, the project of songwriter and guitarist Ellen Kempner. Critics singled it out early. One review named it among the record's essential songs^[3], and a profile in the Boston Globe called it a standout with a fleet-footed groove^[2]. Fewer people have talked about what it is actually saying, which is part of why it deserves a closer look.

Where the song comes from

Kempner was in her early twenties when the album took shape. She had studied classical and jazz guitar at Sarah Lawrence College^[2], and the attention that followed her 2013 EP Bent Nail helped push her to leave school.^[4] By her own account she was going through a very depressed time when she made the record.^[5]

The album was recorded in October 2014 in Brooklyn with producer Gabe Wax, and Kempner played nearly every instrument herself.^[2] It came out on Exploding in Sound in August 2015.^[4] The Boston Globe described its subject as the awkward passage from teenager to adult, with existential questions and romantic longing mixed in.^[2]

That context matters for "Cinnamon" because it is not a song about a single event. There is no breakup scene or dramatic confrontation to point to. It is a song about a pattern, the kind that settles into a life during a period when everything feels unmoored and small compulsions start to feel like the only things you can count on.

The pull of the impulse

The clearest reading comes from a Vibes essay on the track, which hears it as an account of the internal tug-of-war with self-destructive impulses.^[1] The narrator knows what the habits are doing to her. Knowing does not help. What makes the song unusual is the temperature. There is no shouting, no swagger, no melodrama. The delivery is subdued and almost resigned, as if the narrator has stopped arguing with herself and simply started reporting.^[1]

That flatness is a choice, and a smart one. Songs about bad habits often fall into one of two modes: the confessional spiral, where every flaw is turned into a spectacle, or the defiant anthem, where the flaw is recast as a virtue. Kempner avoids both. She treats the impulse the way a person treats weather, as something that arrives, does its damage, and passes, and that will probably arrive again.

In "Cinnamon" that restraint does a lot of work. The calmer the voice, the more the situation underneath it seems to churn, and the listener is left to feel what the singer will not announce.

How the music behaves

The arrangement tells the same story the words do. According to Consequence, the song opens with an upbeat, shimmering groove, with layers of guitar ringing against each other while Kempner sings softly and airily.^[3] The verses are hushed. The chorus lifts into something closer to euphoria. Then the track dissolves into a slow, psychedelic wash, where the words give way to hums and wordless melody.^[3]

Read as a map of the narrator's state, that shape makes sense. The hushed verses are the stretches of control. The lift is the moment the impulse takes over and feels, briefly, wonderful. The wash at the end is what remains afterward: a blur, a fog, a quiet that is part exhaustion and part relief. The Vibes piece makes a similar point, hearing the music stay mostly calm and then turn briefly more forceful, mirroring the restless pull of the urges the song describes.^[1]

It also matters that the guitar is the star. Kempner trained as a jazz and classical player, and her lines here curl and noodle rather than crash. Consequence placed the album as a whole in the lineage of 1990s indie rock, from Pavement and the Pixies to Elliott Smith.^[3] The result is a track that sounds pleasant on the surface. That pleasantness is part of the trap. Self-destruction rarely feels like self-destruction from the inside. It feels easy, even warm.

A spice, a habit, a comfort

The title invites a little speculation, and it is worth being honest that Kempner has not, as far as I could find, explained it in public. A spice is a small thing. It is domestic and sweet, associated with warmth and home and baked goods. It is hard to think of an object less menacing. That gap between a cozy word and a corrosive subject is exactly the gap the song lives in.

You can hear the title as an emblem of how harmful habits disguise themselves. They do not arrive labeled. They arrive as comfort, as routine, as the small pleasure you reach for when the larger pleasures are unavailable. Whether or not that was the intent, it fits the emotional logic of the song and of an album whose title, Kempner has said, points to a slow, dry way of living.^[5]

The ghost in the haze

Consequence heard the song's final stretch as a place where images of crying and ghosts drift into the haze.^[3] That detail rewards attention. A ghost is something that stays after its cause has gone. A habit works the same way. The thing that first produced it, whether a bad year, a relationship, or a stretch of loneliness, may be long past, but the behavior lingers and keeps moving through the rooms.

This ties "Cinnamon" to the rest of the record. The same review found loneliness and confusion running through the album, along with the aftermath of a breakup and a pain that goes deeper than simply getting over someone.^[3] Seen that way, the song is one piece of a larger portrait. The heartbreak explains some of the loneliness, and the loneliness explains some of the habits, and the habits make the loneliness worse. The loop is the subject.

A bittersweet ending

The Vibes essay hears the song ending quietly, with a bittersweet recognition that the narrator's life is good despite the struggle.^[1] This is the most generous part of the song, and perhaps the most truthful. It refuses the idea that you must be fixed before you are allowed to appreciate what you have. Both things can be true at once: the impulses are real and they are not conquered, and the life around them is still worth having.

The album's closing track, "Seekonk," has been described as offering some resolution, with a warmth and sense of support in the present.^[3] If so, "Cinnamon" sits earlier in that arc, at the stage where the person has not yet found the support but has begun to see her own situation clearly. Clear sight is not the same as relief, but it is where relief tends to begin.

Why it resonates

Part of the song's appeal is how little it asks of the listener. You do not need to share the narrator's particular habit to recognize the experience. Almost everyone has some behavior they understand perfectly well and repeat anyway. The song gives that experience a shape without prescribing a cure or passing judgment.

It is also a showcase for a musician who was often underestimated. In the Boston Globe profile, Kempner said that early on, audience members who had dismissed her as a woman with a guitar would come up after the set, surprised by how well she played, and that this happened at least twice in every five shows.^[2] "Cinnamon" is the kind of song that wins those listeners over. It is melodic and approachable, and underneath the easy surface there is a lot of craft in the way the guitars interlock and the structure shifts.

That combination of musical generosity and emotional honesty is what the critical response to the album kept returning to. The record holds a 78 on Metacritic, and reviewers praised the guitar playing and the range from fuzzy pop to fingerpicked ballads.^[4]

Other ways to hear it

Not everyone will hear a song about self-destruction. The sound is so pleasant that the track works fine as a breezy, slightly melancholy love song, and the lyrical imagery is impressionistic enough to support that reading. A listener could take it as a portrait of an intimate relationship that feels both sweet and bad for you, where the habit in question is a person.

There is also a reading that leans on the album's coming-of-age frame. In this version, the song is about the early-adult discovery that you are not simply a victim of circumstances, that you have patterns of your own, and that growing up means noticing them. The narrator is less in crisis than in the middle of a quiet, unglamorous kind of education.

These readings do not cancel each other out. Kempner's writing on this album tends to leave room for several meanings, and the vague, hazy quality of the production invites it. What stays constant is the emotional register: tender, wary, and a little tired.

Conclusion

"Cinnamon" is easy to enjoy and surprisingly hard to shake. It takes a subject that usually gets dramatized and gives it a calm, honest treatment, with music that mirrors the push and pull of the thing it describes. Its closing note is neither triumph nor despair. It is acceptance with the door left slightly open.

For a debut made by someone in her early twenties, in the middle of a depressed stretch and a period of leaving things behind, that is a mature stance. It suggests that the way through a difficult patch is not always to conquer it, but to describe it accurately, and to keep noticing, even in the middle of it, that there is something worth staying for.