A lot has been said about Young’s vocal performance here, and it is genuinely impressive in its loose, conversational style, navigating the fertile ground between pure song and melodic rap delivery. (And I love the little ping-pong delay on the last word of the first chorus at 1:28 too!) But there is plenty to be said about the backing arrangement and performances as well, which have a lot more heavy lifting to do here than in a lot of songs, given the lack of harmonic interest in the ever-present two-bar harmonic loop.

As with Olivia Dean’s 'Man I Need', which I’ve also critiqued recently, the keyboards provide some of the section definition, with the softly brassy pad first heard at 0:19 helping underline the verse’s brooding introspective character and a glassily modulated upper-spectrum synth layer (nicely showcased during the outro at 4:21) opening up the chorus texture – with the exception of the first half of Chorus 1, where a subtle stereo tambourine component effectively serves this function in its place. But it’s the live drums, bass, and guitar performances that really make this production shine, for me, introducing constant variations (and, crucially, of the tasteful human variety, rather than any kind of algorithmic pseudo-randomness) that meaningfully maintain the song’s sense of freshness, despite its almost five-minute running time.

The drummer, for instance, subtly announces the arrival of the first verse with the subtlest of pushed-snare fills at 0:18; reinforces the power of the vocal rhythm for “is that not allowed” midway through each chorus at 1:10, 2:36, and 3:45; and naturally lifts the sense of pace of the first chorus with a busier kick-drum line, and the second chorus by moving the tambourine from eighth-notes to sixteenths. The bass player delivers a tasteful upper-mordent fill heading into the second half of the first verse (0:35), then develops it into a double fill four bars later (0:44); and introduces more sustained lines at 0:16, 0:51, 1:43, 2:18, and 3:27 (none exactly identical, mind) to build towards the start of each of the verses and choruses. And the guitarist pitches subtle fills into gaps in the second-verse vocal line at 1:47, 1:57, and 2:09; gradually lengthens his sustain to build up towards the end of each verse, as well as then seemingly pushing the drive a bit harder to help the chorus sections deliver more power and edge; and contributes a range of spacey, effects-laden atmospheric overdubs such as the one-shots at 0:10, 1:44, and 2:06, the textural layering during the second and third choruses, and of course the soloing at 3:03-3:29.

This is the magic of using live musicians. Whether Young would have had a hit without them in this case, who can say? But I’m pretty confident that they have a lot to do with how big a hit she had, because they make this song more replayable than its core musical content has any right to be.