Imagining My Man

Some love songs are about the person. This one is about the picture of the person, and how stubbornly the picture can outlast the facts. Aldous Harding's "Imagining My Man" lasts nearly six minutes, moves at a crawl, and spends its length circling one uneasy question: what happens when the lover you carry in your head is more convincing than the one in the room?

It is not a song that answers. It is a song that stays in the question with unusual patience, and that patience is where its power comes from.

Where the song sits

"Imagining My Man" was released as the second single from Party, Harding's second album, ahead of its arrival on 19 May 2017 through 4AD and Flying Nun.^[1][3] The album was recorded in Bristol with producer John Parish, best known for his long collaboration with PJ Harvey, and it features guest vocal contributions from Mike Hadreas of Perfume Genius and Fenne Lily.^[3] Reviewers heard the record as a step outward from the hushed introspection of her self-titled debut toward something more expansive and strange.^[4]

The single arrived with a good deal of curiosity attached. Harding had been filed under quiet folk songwriter, and Party complicated that filing. Critics at the time described this track as a bridge, linking the new theatricality of the preceding single "Horizon" with the plainer folk manner of her earlier work.^[1] That is a useful way to hear it. The song begins in a spare, almost domestic mode, with piano and finger-picked guitar, and only gradually admits other voices and instruments.^[1]

A slow build that mimics a mind

The structure matters as much as anything the words convey. One Spinoff critic describes a song that starts intimate and then opens up roughly a minute and a half in, as backing vocals, percussion and electric guitar arrive.^[1] Another hears a choir and a saxophone that recalls 1970s art rock.^[1] A third notes how sparingly the small details are placed, and calls the whole thing a slow burn built on only three chords, with an ending some may find anticlimactic.^[1]

That anticlimax may be deliberate. Imagining a person is a looping activity. It does not climb to a peak and resolve. It returns, adds a detail, subtracts another, and returns again. The three-chord frame and the unhurried pace give the song the feel of a thought being turned over rather than a story being told. The late arrival of brass and percussion feels less like a payoff than like the imagined scene getting more crowded and more vivid, whether or not it ever becomes more true.^[1]

Parish's influence is audible here. A reviewer connected the brass-tinged coda to the sound of PJ Harvey's piano-led album White Chalk, and DIY's review of the record places its gentle acoustic and piano textures in similar company, alongside Scott Walker.^[1][5] The effect is a music that feels intimate and slightly haunted at once, which suits a song about a lover who may be partly a ghost of the singer's own making.

What she has said about it

Harding is famously reluctant to explain her songs. She has said that metaphor drives her writing, that she wants the work left open to interpretation, and that the urge to decode everything feels intrusive.^[8] So the few remarks she has offered deserve attention. In a track-by-track walk through Party for NPR, she framed this song as being about the tender and frightening thoughts that come with being in love, and also about growing up and working out what you want.^[2]

As she tells it, loving another person while holding something of yourself back is hard, and nobody is to blame for that. The advice she closes on is simply to ride it out.^[2] It is a strikingly unromantic piece of counsel for a love song. There is no promise of union and no verdict on the beloved. There is only endurance, and a recognition that the difficulty is shared and blameless.

Expectation versus the person

The critics who wrote about the single when it appeared converge on a shared reading. One hears a song about letting go of expectations of romantic love.^[1] Another says it sets the expectations of love against its reality.^[1] A third hears reflection and a kind of acceptance, the point at which you stop caring so intensely about how things are supposed to go.^[1]

This is the most persuasive way into the song. The title announces a mental act. The narrator is not with the man but conjuring him, and conjuring is never neutral. We edit the people we love in private, smoothing awkward edges and promoting the traits we need. The 4AD description of the track puts the emphasis on a curiosity about a lover's idiosyncrasies, and that word is revealing.^[6] Idiosyncrasies are exactly what a daydream tends to sand down and a real relationship refuses to.

So the song can be read as a quiet negotiation between two versions of one person. There is the imagined partner who behaves, and there is the actual partner who surprises, disappoints and charms in ways nobody scripted. Growing up, in the sense Harding mentions, may partly mean learning to prefer the second to the first.^[2]

Self-denial and the shape of desire

Harding's remark about loving someone while holding yourself back suggests a second, more inward layer.^[2] The difficulty she describes is not only that the beloved falls short of the fantasy. It is that the lover also limits themselves. Wanting someone can involve a measure of self-restraint, a refusal to take everything on offer, and the song seems to dwell in that restraint without condemning it.

This helps explain the music's tone. Nothing in the arrangement is melodramatic. Even when the full band arrives, it arrives gently, with a few shouted interjections that one critic found lighter than the ominous buzz of the previous single.^[1] The emotion is held at arm's length, as if the singer were observing her own longing from a slight distance. That distance is a kind of self-protection, and also a kind of honesty about how love feels from the inside: thrilling and frightening in the same breath.

The video and the persona

The accompanying video, directed by Charlotte Evans, deepens the sense of watching someone perform an inner state. It was shot inside a car in grey, downtown Auckland, as a companion to the video for "Horizon."^[1][7] Harding appears in black, with a woman in white beside her who is her manager, a role played by her mother in the earlier clip.^[1] She engages the camera, sometimes singing along and sometimes simply regarding the viewer, and one critic noted how she acts with her body while undercutting any solemnity with a flicker of a smile.^[1]

That mixture of gravity and mischief is central to Harding's art. She has built a stage persona that is unnervingly controlled, and the video plays with the idea that the performance is itself a kind of imagining. Who is the woman in the car, and where is she going? The question echoes the song's own uncertainty about where an imagined romance leads.^[1]

Alternative readings

Not everyone hears a song about romantic fantasy. Because Harding rarely pins her imagery down, listeners have taken the title more literally, as a story about a woman waiting for, or inventing, a partner she has not yet met. In that version the song is about hope rather than disillusion, and the slow swelling arrangement reads as optimism gathering strength.

Others hear it as a study in how long-term partners rehearse each other. We carry running models of the people we live with, and we are sometimes startled when the model is wrong. On this reading the song is not a lament but a gentle observation about intimacy, which always involves a degree of invention.

These readings are not mutually exclusive. Harding's own phrase about tenderness and fear covers all of them, and the music is spacious enough to hold each one.

Place within Party

Party as a whole is full of oblique portraits of desire, restraint and social performance, and its title invites a wry reading of the gathering at which everyone is acting a role. Elsewhere on this site you can compare how other artists use the idea of a party, in works such as "Pressure to Party" and "Dinner Party," which approach the theme of social performance from very different angles.

Within Harding's own album, "Imagining My Man" is the slow, reflective centre of gravity. The record was widely praised, and its reception pushed Harding well beyond her New Zealand base, with the album later winning the Taite Music Prize.^[3] This song is a good example of why. It trusts the listener with silence, with repetition and with an unresolved feeling.

Why it lingers

The song resonates because almost everyone has done what it describes. We all keep a version of someone in our heads, whether a crush, a partner, a parent or a future self, and we all know the small vertigo of the gap between that version and the real thing. Harding does not mock the habit or recommend we abandon it. She offers a long, slow, strangely tender meditation on what it costs and what it protects.

The advice to ride it out is the closest the song comes to a thesis.^[2] It treats love as something to be lived through rather than solved, and it treats the imagination as both a comfort and a risk. By the time the brass fades and the song stops without fireworks, the listener has been given what Harding's best work often offers: not an explanation, but a space to stand in while the feeling does its work.