What is a girl? — Colin Meloy & gender in songwriting

Joe Criger
Sep 8, 2018 · 3 min read

“I’ll Be Your Girl” is a song that I never imagined would merit an explanation. It’s about as straightforward as “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Let Me Be Your Hog”. There’s no real room for ambiguity: Colin Meloy wants to be your girl as badly as Weird Al wants to be your hog. And while whatever Al means by “hog” remains up for interpretation, Colin Meloy spends almost all of “I’ll Be Your Girl” explicitly stating what he means by that.

So why does no dude on the internet think it’s a man’s song? Or even weirder still, that the narrator of this song is somehow not Colin Meloy?

The answer is mostly patriarchy, but it’s at least a little bit that the song itself is meta as hell.

I’ve been listening to The Decemberists since 2005’s Picaresque, and if you’ve also been listening to The Decemberists for that long, you’ve probably noticed the same thing: Colin Meloy’s songs are — for an uncommonly large part — gender neutral. Love songs like “On the Bus Mall” and “O Valencia!” are written in the first and second person deliberately to keep the songs accessible to any audience.

Could the reckless daredevil spy in “The Bagman’s Gambit” be a woman and the narrator a male desk jockey? I know that’s how I’ve always imagined it, just because it makes her so much more interesting. But who’s to say it isn’t about two men? Or women? Not The Decemberists, and that’s the point.

When Colin includes the subject or object’s gender, it’s far more likely that said narrator isn’t meant to be whoever is singing the song. “We Both Go Down Together”, a song about a rich psychopath raping and later murdering a homeless woman under the delusion that she loves him, is gendered both to indicate that it’s a fictional story and as a commentary on the kinds of people who can get away with rape and murder-suicide. (That said, Miranda could be a gender neutral surname, if you’re so inclined.)

I could go on proving my Decemberists bona fides all day, but the main question is: why does a man sing “I’ll Be Your Girl”, and why is it so crucial to the song that to not realize that is to miss the point completely?

It’s because “I’ll Be Your Girl” isn’t only a love song. It’s a song about songwriting.

What are “girls” in song? To be a man in an American love song is to be assertive, confident, reckless. It’s to show off until someone is impressed enough to have sex with you. To be a girl is to wait in the background, like Taylor Swift in “You Belong With Me”, providing emotional support to someone who’s hurt from being ignored.

Being a typical rock and roll Man is great in small doses, but whoever chooses to be with you is going to have a long, lonely time being ignored while you pursue whatever it is you do to impress people. Offering someone the emotional support to help them get through their life and the time to listen to them — that’s what being “a girl” is.

And that’s ridiculous.

“I’ll Be Your Girl” mocks how tied to our gender roles we are that simply listening to someone and comforting them somehow makes a person “feminine” and thus “weak” or “less-than”. Things we associate with “girls” in song have value — and they have a lot more value than all of the crap we associate with being someone’s Man. And it does this without sarcasm, without irony. Just with the sweet sincerity of saying, at the end of a long day, I’ll be there for you. I’ll be your girl.

The real irony of it all is, Colin Meloy has explained this many, many times, and guys online are still not getting it.

You really do have to be ready to call yourself a girl to listen to someone else.