“Erotic” is a song Olivia Barton almost didn’t finish. The music itself is lonely, just Barton’s voice and a guitar. She presents a traumatic moment in her life, a sexual violation in her adolescence, in no uncertain terms. The song is blunt, but deeply emotional; it is both a wrenching look into a painful experience and a release of things too heavy to hold alone.
Barton said that “normally when I’m writing, I forget that anyone will ever hear it. But I was really aware of it when writing this one—it felt too graphic, too heavy, too much. I remember thinking ‘no one needs to hear this.’ But then I realized that actually a lot of people need to hear this. It’s not that I kept going to help anyone, it’s just that it allowed me to put away that fear and continue to write it for myself.” She has put her hurt on display both to process it herself and to encourage others who have been through something similar to do the same.
This isn’t the first time Barton has shared this story. “I wrote about it for the first time with the song ‘If You Say I’m Special’ on my first album. That was about three years after it all happened, and even then, I couldn’t quite access the experience,” she said. “That song, to me, has so much emotion in it but not much clarity or specificity at all. It took another four years for me to start writing ‘Erotic.’” In the interim, it is clear that Barton is able to put words to the pain, finally.
“If You Say I’m Special” is a sweeping, echoing ballad, and she is certainly vague in her descriptions of events. “I’ve lost any dignity I might have learned by this age. / So come on, baby, dig in deep / at this point, it’s all fair game,” she belts over a heavy acoustic guitar and thumping drum beat. “Erotic” is the opposite; stark and almost stunted, with short lines that say exactly what she means: “I was young, I didn’t know I had a choice / then you hypnotized me with a whip / and I cried so hard I vomited.” Barton’s words make you wince at first, like you’ve been whipped as well. But the fact that these words exist is a testament to Barton’s strength–she’s been harmed, but she’s moved beyond the fear of being seen and her emotions being unimportant.
Barton’s quiet pain is raw, but it’s the innocence permeating the lyrics that make them sting: “Was it erotic? / My joy, my elation? / Did you feel big / taking it?” That last question is phrased perfectly to frame its asker: someone too young to grasp the gravity of what’s been taken from them, but old enough to know it isn’t right. Her voice, layered over itself, soft and sweet, contrasts the heaviness of her words. “It just sucks that that’s the way life works—we all experience things in our adolescence that, looking back, seem to have fundamentally changed how we proceeded into our adult lives,” Barton said. “It’s painful, and it’s ok, and it’s our job to heal it so that we can live wholeheartedly now.”
Art is an emotional outlet, and this song’s content and its existence emphasize the ways we process trauma through art. In a literal sense, the lyrics describe the expression of what she cannot say: “Silence is my origin / I’m a woman of service to men. / So I went to women’s group in spring, / they gave me paint and said, ‘draw anything.’ / I was a yellow watercolor in the corner, / you were a black permanent marker everywhere.” The song closes with this line, followed by about a minute of bare guitar and a sound almost like a glitch that are both gradually swallowed by an atmospheric echo. It’s not unfinished, but it doesn’t necessarily end with finality, either—it’s ongoing, just like grief.
Barton is reclaiming her history with “Erotic.” She wrote it for herself, and for, unfortunately, so many others who join her in trying to move past violation. Barton wants to present this song intentionally, to be able to speak truthfully to her experience and heal in honesty. “I know the people in my life have meant well when they’ve said ‘I want to kill that guy.’ But that actually doesn’t make me feel better,” she said. “I want to make it clear that I’m not looking for a collective ‘I want to kill that guy.’ I wrote this to give voice to the gray area, the nuance, the confusion. I wrote it to finally see myself. But if I’m looking for anything, it’s not anger or pity. It’s a simple: ‘Ouch. That sounds so painful. I see you.’”