Wednesday, May 4, 2022 — 3 
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Lizzy McAlpine crafts an honest narrative of love and heartbreak on 
‘five seconds flat’

In the world of TikTok and playlists, 
many artists trying to break into music 
are ditching big projects like albums 
and EPs and opting for more frequent 
single releases to increase their 
chances of being heard. Despite these 
arguments surrounding algorithms 
and playlisting, Lizzy McAlpine’s 
latest album, five seconds flat, has seen 
widespread success and is a testament 
to the power of full-length albums. 
Upon release, McAlpine advised fans 
to listen to the album start to finish, 
writing on Instagram, “i really put a lot 
of work into making sure that the track 
list was in the right order and the story 
that it told was cohesive so i would urge 
you to listen through the first time in 
order.”
Following McAlpine’s advice and 
listening to the 45-minute long album 
track-by-track, it’s clear that she put a 
lot of care into her storytelling, and the 

listening experience is entirely different 
when thinking about the songs as a 
story arc instead of individual tracks. 
The album opens with “doomsday,” 
the first single off five seconds flat that 
McAlpine released last fall. With the 
haunting opening line, “Pull the plug 
in September / I don’t wanna die in 
June,” the song sets the tone for what’s 
to follow and primes listeners for the 
nostalgic undertones that permeate the 
album. 
five seconds flat walks listeners 
through the phases of moving on from a 
relationship. Starting with melancholic 
reflections of a breakup on “an ego 
thing,” McAlpine then transitions 
into “erase me (feat. Jacob Collier),” 
which McAlpine describes as a song 
that depicts the “hoe phase,” which 
typically follows a breakup. From there, 
she moves to “all my ghosts,” a song that 
wrestles with the challenges of falling in 
love again after being hurt by a previous 
partner. Likewise, “reckless driving 
(feat. Ben Kessler)” and “firearm” also 
explore the idea of past pains inhibiting 

trust in new relationships. Even as 
McAlpine moves between new forms of 
love and mourning, a common thread 

always persists: It’s nearly impossible 
to completely erase someone’s memory, 
even when life continues on. 
There’s a pause in this narrative 
on “chemtrails,” a song dedicated to 

McAlpine’s father, who passed away 
two years ago. “I still play with my food, 
I’m a child at the grown-up’s table / It’s 

so hard to believe, but right now, I feel 
stable,” McAlpine croons over a gentle 
piano. The song ends with samples 
from home videos of McAlpine and her 
father from when she was younger. 

McAlpine concludes the album 
with “orange show speedway,” an 
anthemic pop track that is vastly 
different from any of its predecessors 
on the album. Like “chemtrails,” 
“orange show speedway” samples vlogs 
from McAlpine’s YouTube channel, 
featuring her and her friends. Despite 
the energy of this ending track, the 
last line brings us full circle and is 
a reminder of the album’s central 
message: 
“When you’re racing head-
first towards something that’ll kill 
you in five seconds flat / When I’m 
racing head-first towards everything 
that I want back.” Whether it’s a past 
relationship or a lost family member, 
McAlpine brings comfort to those who 
are still chasing feelings that have been 
lost. While this line doesn’t necessarily 
provide the closure one would expect, 
it emphasizes the fact that mourning 
is not a linear process. Our pasts shape 
how we approach future relationships 
and life experiences. 

KAITLYN FOX
Daily Arts Writer

The movie lover’s guide to graduation

With coming-of-age stories, there’s 
often a fascination with senior year of 
high school. Graduating from high 
school represents the death of grade 
school, the inflection point where 
you leave your hometown in favor 
of college, the epitome of new: new 
places, new experiences, new people. 
College is the beginning of the rest 
of your life; high school graduation 
represents the end of everything you 
knew.
There are a lot of movies, across 
genres, that show high school 
graduations. In the past few years, 
many outlets made lists of them in 
honor of the graduation ceremonies 
that were canceled due to the 
pandemic. But these movies usually 
stop short of showing the next step, as 
if college is the happy ending rather 
than just the beginning.
When I applied for Daily Arts, 
I wrote about Greta Gerwig’s 2017 
coming-of-age story, “Lady Bird,” 
which came out, aptly enough, when I 
was a senior in high school. My friends 
and I made plans to watch the movie 
with the joke that we would “watch 
‘Lady Bird’ and have an existential 
crisis together,” but high school got 

busy, and we never got around to it. 
For my application, I wrote about how 
I’m pretty sure “Lady Bird” would’ve 
made me incredibly uncomfortable 
if I’d watched it as a senior. My main 
reasoning is a sequence near the 
end of the movie: Lady Bird (Saoirse 
Ronan, “Little Women”) is in college 
in New York and goes to a party 
where she gets drunk, throws up 
and finds herself desperately missing 
home. It’s a harsh look at college — 
not as a happy ending, but a whole 
new world to conquer and get used to.

In my opinion, although high 
school graduation might be more 

symbolically 
significant, 
college 
graduation is exponentially more 
terrifying. Most people think of a few 
discrete paths after you graduate high 
school, whereas the potential post-
college routes, despite being roughly 
the same, feel more infinite when 
the scale is changed. And instead of 
leaving behind a class full of people 
that you’ve known for most of your 
life, you’re graduating along with 
thousands of people you’ve never 
met before and a handful of people 
that have become the most important 

people in your life — like members of 
a strange, often stressed, sometimes 

intoxicated, consistently loyal family.
This is the last piece that I’m going 
to be writing for The Daily before 
I graduate, and all I think about is 
how I’ll feel when graduation finally 
hits. It’s difficult to fully process that 
I’m about to leave a place I’ve called 
home for four very full, very strange 
years. It’s worse to consider that, 
even if I return to campus, things 
will be irreparably different as soon 
as I don my cap and gown and get my 
diploma in the mail. And so, like most 
self-respecting film writers, I turn to 
movies in times of difficulty.
Like 
many 
rational, 
older 
Generation Z’ers, “graduation movie” 
makes me think of a classic: “High 
School Musical 3: Senior Year.” 
Ignoring the cheesy tone of the movie 
and the logistical inconsistencies 
(how exactly does Gabriella start 
going to Stanford before high school 
is even finished?), it’s a sweet movie 
that encapsulates the feeling of trying 
to hold on to the final moments before 
you leave. The characters all seem to 
be stuck in a nostalgia before they’ve 
even graduated, and I’m finding 
myself in some of the same spirals. 
What will I remember about my time 
here before I leave? What will it be 
like to return?
It’s surprising how relevant the 
songs of “HSM 3” feel in the context 

of graduating, in any sense. Troy’s 
regularly-scheduled, 
angst-ridden 
“what do I do now?” song, “Scream,” 
demonstrates the difficulty of making 
decisions that will affect the rest of 
your life. With Gabriella’s regularly-
scheduled, dramatic “I have to leave 
now” song, “Walk Away,” the lyrics 
(like “No goodbyes ’cause I can’t bear 
to say it”) hit a little too hard when 
you’re ready to say goodbyes of your 
own. Not to mention that part of 
me wants to come back to campus 
in a few years and recreate my own 
version of “The Boys are Back.”
I also watched another memorable 
graduation 
movie, 
“Booksmart,” 
which follows two girls who, trying to 
make up for an academically-focused 
and socially-lacking high school 
experience, bounce between raucous 
parties the night before graduation. 
The story comes to a climax in 
dramatic fashion: Molly (Beanie 
Feldstein, “Impeachment: American 
Crime Story”) bails Amy (Kaitlyn 
Dever, “Dear Evan Hansen”) out of 
jail, drives a flashy, flame-covered 
car through a fence, passionately 
kisses a boy onstage in front of the 
entire senior class and then delivers 
a sweet, “unscripted” valedictorian 
speech.

KARI ANDERSON
Daily Arts Writer

Read more at michigandaily.com

Read more at michigandaily.com

This image is owned by Owned by AWAL Recordings America.

Design by Lindsay Farb

