Healthier Folk

Most songs about feeling out of place describe a room: the party you left early, the school hallway, the family dinner. "Healthier Folk" describes a body and a mood, and the awkward suspicion that everyone else was issued a better one. It is the second track on Palehound's debut, a three-minute burst of clattering guitar and deadpan observation, and it manages to be both very funny and quietly devastating.

Ellen Kempner has never published a line-by-line explanation of the song, and no interview I could find pins down her intent. What we have instead is a set of strong clues: the circumstances in which the album was made, the way critics heard the song, and the music video that accompanied its release. Together they point toward a song about self-image, illness (of the body and of the spirit), and the exhausting experience of being managed by people who think they know what you need.

Where the song came from

"Healthier Folk" appears on Dry Food, released on August 14, 2015 through Exploding in Sound. The album was recorded in October 2014 in Brooklyn with Gabe Wax producing, and Kempner wrote the arrangements and played every instrument except drums.^[1] It runs under half an hour across eight songs, which gives the whole record the feel of a long, unguarded conversation that ends before it can turn awkward.

The songs were written when Kempner was around twenty-one. An NPR-syndicated review describes her as a shy kid in a confining New York suburb who picked up the guitar as an outlet, then found college just as stifling. She turned to songwriting again to work through anxiety, self-doubt, and sadness over fading relationships. When her 2013 EP Bent Nail drew unexpected attention, she left school to concentrate on music.^[3] The same review sums up the record's concerns as the messy passage from childhood to adulthood, a painful breakup, and isolation.^[3]

Kempner herself has been candid about the headspace. Asked about the period, she said she was going through a very depressed time, wanted to leave college, and was not in a good situation. She described the title track as being about a slow, dry, unglamorous way of living, and said she named the album after it because it best reflected what she was trying to communicate.^[2] That image, of life as something bland and hard to swallow, is a useful lens for the song that precedes the title track by three spots.

Feeling half-formed among the well

The central emotional situation of "Healthier Folk" is easy to state. The narrator is surrounded by people who seem more together, more robust, more at ease in their own skin, and she measures herself against them and comes up short. Stereogum heard it as a simmering outsider anthem, the sound of someone who feels out of place among well-adjusted people but does not actually want to be anyone other than herself.^[4] That distinction matters. The song is not a plea to be fixed. It is closer to a shrug with teeth.

The same writer argued that the song's barbs land on society rather than on Kempner,^[4] and that reading is persuasive. The title frames the world as divided into the healthy and everyone else, and it does so with a slightly sour politeness, the way a person might say it when they are tired of hearing it. The narrator's sense of falling short is real, but the song also quietly wonders who set the standard and why everyone is so sure of it.

There is a second layer here that is worth taking seriously. A review at Audiofemme highlighted the way the song conveys the sensation of being coddled, handled with exaggerated care as though the narrator were fragile.^[7] Anyone who has dealt with depression, anxiety, or a chronic condition will recognize this. The kindness of well-meaning people can carry its own message: we are worried about you, which means we see you as a problem. Being treated as breakable can make you feel more broken.

Sickness as a social condition

Reading "Healthier Folk" as a song about sickness does not require believing that it is about one particular diagnosis. The word in the title is relative. These people are healthier than someone, which implies a narrator who is, at least in her own estimation, unwell. Given Kempner's own description of the depression that surrounded the writing of the album,^[2] it is reasonable to hear the song as an account of mental health as much as physical health, and of the way the two blur together in a young person's picture of herself.

What the song does with that material is more interesting than simple confession. Kempner delivers it in a flat, almost casual register. Audiofemme described the album's vocals as deadpan and matter-of-fact, a manner that conceals as much feeling as it reveals, and praised her gift for vivid imagery in describing emotion.^[7] This is the key to the song's tone. The deadpan voice is a defense, a way of describing a painful comparison without handing anyone the satisfaction of seeing it hurt. The pain gets expressed instead by the music.

The sound of a mind getting away from itself

Reviewers consistently reach for the American college-rock of the 1990s when describing the track. DIY called it music in the vein of that scene, with twisting guitars and busy, loud drums, a wistful vocal, and an explosive finish.^[5] Stereogum noted muffled, clattering riffs with a jangly precision, ending in a carnival-like guitar solo that throws the song off course.^[4] The Connecticut Public review heard a clattering lament with fuzzy acoustic strumming and sweet melodies, with guitar work that hints at the snarling, blown-out feedback of Pavement.^[3]

Those descriptions line up in a revealing way. The song begins composed and tuneful, with the kind of sweetness that suggests someone holding it together. Then the ending comes loose. The solo does not resolve the song so much as derail it, and the effect is of a mind that has been politely nodding along and finally cannot keep up the act. If the words are the deadpan surface, the arrangement is what happens underneath.

It also reflects Kempner's skills as a guitarist. Wikipedia notes that Rolling Stone's Will Hermes praised her playing, and that NPR's Mike Katzif heard an artist coming into her own.^[1] On a record as short as this one, the wild ending of a song like this works as a release valve for the tension the verses keep tightly wound.

The video and the beauty standard

The most explicit statement about what the song might be circling arrived with its video. Directed by Faye Orlove, the clip was premiered on Stereogum on the day Dry Food came out. The site described it as taking on beauty standards with a surgical gross-out flair, with images that include an attempt to burn a doll with a magnifying glass and lotion smeared over a phone.^[6]

This shifts the emphasis in a helpful way. "Healthier" can mean more than fit or well. In a culture saturated with wellness and appearance, it also means prettier, more polished, more put-together. The video connects the narrator's feeling of inadequacy to the images of idealized bodies that make a person feel behind, and then treats those images with disgust and mischief. It is a rebuke to the idea that the people who look healthy are the ones who are.

Kempner did not offer a statement about the video that I could find, so it is fair to treat Orlove's concept as a companion interpretation rather than an authorial decoder ring. Still, the pairing is telling. It suggests that the song's concern with health and self-image was always partly about the way bodies are judged, a theme Kempner would take up more directly on later records such as Black Friday.^[8]

Other ways to hear it

One alternative reading is that the song is a breakup song in disguise. Audiofemme summed up the album as a short collection of casual heartbreak,^[7] and others have tied the record to a first major heartbreak. Heard that way, the healthier folk could be the people the narrator imagines her ex finding more comfort among, the ones who are easier to be around. The sense of being too much, or not enough, fits both a romantic and a social reading.

Another is that the song is simply a joke at the narrator's own expense, with the title as the punchline. Kempner's humor is a constant across the record, and the song's brisk, almost cheerful drive supports the idea that she is laughing at herself while she stings. The two readings are not exclusive. Much of the album's charm lies in the way it lets a person be funny and hurt at the same time.

Why it lasts

Songs about alienation usually ask for sympathy or demand rebellion. "Healthier Folk" does neither. It describes the daily arithmetic of comparison, the sense that others are living more successfully, and it lets the guitar do the screaming. That restraint is why it still lands. Anyone who has felt like the weak link in a room of competent people can hear themselves in it, and anyone who has been the one doing the worrying might hear something a little uncomfortable.

In the context of Palehound's career, it also shows how much was already in place at the start: the dry wit, the guitar that flares up when the words run out, and the willingness to examine her own mind without self-pity. Kempner would later write more openly about the body, queer identity, and friendship, and the Fader described Black Friday as her most authentic record.^[8] The seeds of that openness are audible here, in a song about not quite fitting into a world of people who seem to have it all figured out.

The song's final lesson may be the one it never states. Feeling unwell in a world that prizes wellness is lonely, but it is also a vantage point. From there you can see how much of what passes for health is performance, and how much kindness is condescension. "Healthier Folk" sits in that vantage point and takes notes, then lets the guitar go off the rails.