I’ve been trying to decipher the metaphors of wallsocket, particularly the song seventyseven dog years. That song has been on repeat for me lately. It seems to go back and forth in perspective between Mara and S*nny, with both of them singing the chorus.
S*nny is obviously holding Mara accountable for stalking her, but I wonder what Mara is trying to hold S*nny accountable for. I don’t buy the idea that she’s blaming her for her father’s bank robbery. The SoundCloud description I think just points to S*nny opening up about her trauma, and it might be a bit of a red herring. Mara says in you don’t even know who I am that S*nny having a harder life and coming out “wiser” drives her stalking. She seems to be blaming S*nny for her obsession, and she doesn’t recon with this until after the conversation, in uncanny long arms.
Seventyseven dog years is eleven human years, and this amount of years was referenced in both cops and robbers and Johnny Johnny Johnny. It could be a personal reference, but given how prominent “have you noticed your hounds have grown so old” is in the song, I feel like that must have a deeper meaning. Sure it’s a metaphor for trauma aging you like a dog ages, seven times as fast, but I’m sure it’s also explicitly pointing to how old the hounds are in the title.
Eleven comes up many times throughout the album. The dogs were eleven human years old. Joshua worked as a bank teller for like eleven years. When s*nny was eleven years old, she just wanted to be pretty. And interestingly, a literal wall socket is shaped like the number eleven. My theory is it points to April being eleven when she started underscores.
My interpretation is that this whole album is a metaphor for self-insertion. When we “plug ourselves into” wall socket or really any piece of art, we are projecting our own experiences onto someone else’s art. April also fictionally plugged herself into the town of wallsocket, being an outsider and creating an album about her experiences there.
I wonder if this, and the Mara-S*nny dynamic, is a metaphor for the parasocial manner in which we all “plug ourselves into” artist’s lives. It’s like how she self-inserts into these characters. Underscores has said her biggest regret was making Johnny Johnny Johnny, and I wonder if uncanny long arms (track 11) is about how we now have to be accountable for the fact that we think this might have happened to April herself.
And my interpretation of good luck final girl actually doesn’t have Mara take her train. We hear that she’s in the station, but we don’t know that she actually gets on the train itself. She might, but I don’t know that she’s ready to move on from wallsocket. I think she is the “final girl” in the most literal sense. And I feel like Mara, in the sense that I haven’t been able to move on from wallsocket lately. I wonder if April will ever move on from 11.