In college I lamented, "I wish I could buy back the woman you stole," from my other favorite Fever to Tell track "Y-Control," but "Maps" stabs like a knife every time. While "Y-Control"describes Karen O's desire to exert her capitalistic power to re-purchase the woman that renegade lover of hers kidnapped, presumably with a receipt or some other provable paper record, "Maps" leaves any and all transactions behind at the door.
"Wait... they don't love you like I love you," O sings. The naked, desperate pleading in her voice matches the way I felt about a person I knew during a good portion (3 years, at least) of my life. The quiet entreaty of a single word, "wait,"asks O's lover to pause, reconsider, weigh his options. "They don't love you like I love you," she reminds him; have faith that what we have is enough, and you don't need to search for it anywhere else with some other girl.
And so what are the maps? Maps are carefully planned documents of the paths we take together and apart from each other in life. Maps show us how to get from A to B. They guide us and keep us calm when we're lost with the promise of direction. When O says "Maps" she's reminding him of their countless private plans for the future and of the journeys they have already shared. She's talking about the space and time they have traveled together and requesting that those maps will guide his next step.
Brian Chase's pounding drums, like a heartbeat, reiterate O's constancy. And Nick Zinner's sprawling, dreamlike, astronomically beautiful guitar work shows the extent and almost otherworldly range of O's love. She hasn't lost him yet; she still hangs on by some thread clutched in her claws. This song happens right before the imminent fall out. This song is the last ditch effort, an effort that I suffered many times, and for a long time would have voluntarily suffered again and again just to keep it going, to keep "Maps" playing on the iPod on repeat.
And while Pitchfork pisses me off most of the time, what with their love for ludicrous bands like Fleet Foxes, I can thank them at the very least for their timely tip-of-the-hat to a song that still makes me sullen with memory. "Wait, they don't love you like I love you." Karen O sings for me in a time and space where I don't really exist anymore and where all pre-existing maps have been shredded to pieces, but if my voice wouldn't kill anyone in a 5 mile radius, and if life went the way you expected it to go as a young, idealistic teenager, I'd sing those words myself. Because, in their own small and insufficient way, they couldn't be more true.
