I built something real last year and it’s mine and it’s working. The career is on track and I have the bod of a 16 year old thanks to a gym routine that begins and ends before my friends even open their eyes every morning. I’m the girl people call when they need someone who actually has her shit together. I can get a guy for a night and sometimes I do but apparently I’m not girlfriend material. I come home to an apartment I love, in a life I built, and check a phone that has nothing on it. Abby Nissenbaum wrote that feeling into a song, and ‘Why Does No One Want Me’ has been sitting in my head at a damn inconvenient volume ever since.
The production on this doesn’t fuck around. It’s got that sad girl alt pop energy where the sound feels deceptively polished while the lyrics are quietly falling apart underneath it. Abby described it as her “typical sad girl anthem vibe” and she wasn’t wrong about that.
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She opens with “5 AM I hit the ground running / like 401, got ks that I’m hunting” and we’re already in it with her, already feeling the momentum of someone who doesn’t wait for life to happen to her. Then she drops the most confident line in the song: “I’m a catch, you must have dropped something.” God, the audacity of that line. She clocked her own worth a long time ago and has zero interest in revisiting it. And then she hits you with “I work hard to keep this shit going / hold me down but I just keep growing / call the shots but still never chosen” and that’s where the whole thing cracks open. She’s doing everything right and running the show and it means absolutely nothing when it comes to someone actually wanting her around past sunrise. That’s the shit that keeps you up at night.
Then the chorus arrives and everything the verses built just drops out from under her. “Why does no one want me at all? / Is it too late, am I just meant to be alone?” That’s the question she’s been outrunning since 5am. All that discipline and hustle and it still can’t touch this. The same girl who just told you she’s a catch is now sitting with the question she’s most afraid to have answered. That’s a hell of a turn, and Nissenbaum nails it because she doesn’t oversell it.
The second verse is where she gets honest about the pattern she can’t shake. She opens with “Disciplined but I can’t help falling” and damn, we’ve all been that person. You can have your whole life locked down and still catch feelings for someone who was never going to stay. “So in love with ghosts in my pocket” and she’s carrying feelings for people who already moved on, knowing it while it’s happening, which is its own special kind of torture. Then comes “Get attached while they just keep walking, no” and that “no” at the end is doing so much work. That shit hits harder than any dramatic breakdown could. She closes the verse with “So I stay ahead in my own lane / strategize but I won’t play the game / still I wait and hope I win someday” and she’s not going to lower her standards to get chosen faster. She’d rather wait and hope something real eventually shows up. I respect the hell out of that even as it’s clearly costing her something.
The bridge is where she finally stops running. “There’s this fear that I’ve had for so long / when I’m by myself and the lights are off” and that’s 3am with nothing to distract you from the question you’ve been avoiding all day. “Will I have to do this all on my own” and the dread in that line is so much worse than self-pity would be. Self-pity at least has some drama to it. This is just a woman alone with a fear she can’t logic her way out of. And then: “For once I really want to be wrong.” She delivers it with no armor left, and goddamn if it doesn’t sit with you.
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Abby Nissenbaum started out classically trained, spent her youth doing regional theatre, and enrolled in a BFA Musical Theatre program before saying actually, never mind. She pivoted to Social Psychology, got her graduate degree at the University of Memphis, and somehow ended up in Nashville making indie rock. The classical soprano vocals are still there, she just blew the dust off them and handed them to producers Riley Geare and Matt Qualls to do something genuinely wild with. Her whole thing is writing about mental health, LGBTQ+ life, and the parts of society that deserve to get called out, and she does it with the kind of soulful, raw delivery that makes you feel like she’s talking directly to you at 2am when you’re not okay.
She says the chorus “hints at a deeper fear that I think many people my age are feeling” and yeah, no shit. The whole app ecosystem is built on fast dopamine hits and she’s out here wanting someone to actually stay in the room with her. “In the age of app swiping and quick validation over real connection am I destined to be alone forever?” That’s the real question underneath all the sass. She’s asking it because it won’t leave her alone.
I’ve been sitting with ‘Why Does No One Want Me’ for a few days now and something shifted. The career is still on track and the phone still has less on it than I’d like, but Abby put words to something I’d been carrying around like it was my fault. Like the discipline and the drive and the whole damn package should have been enough to make someone stay, and the fact that it hasn’t is some personal failing I need to fix. Abby sits in the dark asking the same question and refuses to pretend she’s above it. This song skips the reassurance and goes straight to making you feel less alone. That’s not nothing. That’s actually everything.
