I have a Notes app graveyard of things I almost said. There’s one from March, one from just before Christmas, and about six from that week in August where I kept convincing myself I was overthinking everything and he was probably fine. All of them drafted in a moment of courage and gone before I could talk myself into it. I was nineteen the first time I had to be the one to end something and I genuinely had no idea how people did it. There is nothing like the hell of already knowing and being completely unable to act on it. I have stood in front of a bathroom mirror at midnight rehearsing words that never made it out of my mouth. Sat in a parking lot outside his apartment so long the windows fogged up, then drove home without going inside. Typed “we need to talk” so many times and erased the whole thing every time he sent something sweet that made the plan collapse. His smile had absolutely no business being that effective, I will say that much. Ava Valianti’s ‘The Conversation’ is the song I needed for every one of those nights, wrapped in dream pop that makes the heartbreak feel gorgeous when it has no right to.
Ava opens on something deceptively sweet. “Piggy back / Over poison ivy / You get brushed a thousand times / But I’m above you, flying” and right there she has already mapped the whole dynamic. She is the one elevated. He is the one getting scratched while she moves through it like it is not happening. Then: “Double feature / Outdoor screens / Reruns, new ones, going steady / What does it all mean?” Young love and drive-in sweetness, and then that question dropped so casually you almost miss it. What does it all mean? She already knows the answer and she is asking anyway, and damn, that is the whole song in one question.
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She stops running from it in the chorus. “If we cut to the chase would I still be running / Would it all fall apart as I left you there / If I stopped biting my tongue could I ever stop twisting your words so I wouldn’t have to care / You are habit, I am pain / Conversation with the rain” and I need a second with that. She has been reframing what he says. Twisting his words to make herself care less, to make leaving feel more justified. I have done that and it is a shitty thing to recognize in yourself. But the line that truly gets me is “you are habit, I am pain.” She has already made the diagnosis. She is the one who hurts.
Second verse is where Ava stops pretending. “Hurt me, baby / With your smile / Please don’t trust me when I say / I can go another mile” and she is warning him. She is asking him to hurt her with his happiness and admitting in the same breath that she has been lying about being okay. I dated someone once who kept telling me he was fine and I kept believing him and I really should have known better. Ava knew better and she wrote it into the lyrics. “I’ll break my heart / To stop your bleeding / But I can’t let you in my mind / No, can’t give you that vision” and she will blow herself up to protect him and she will not let him see the cost. That is kind of a badass move, actually, even if it is also the saddest thing in the song.
It comes back twice and I need you to pay attention to what shifts each time, because that is where she finally tells you the truth. “If we cut to the chase would I still be running / Would it all fall apart as I left you there / If I stopped dragging my feet would you understand me or would you still believe my goods were rare / You are content, I’m unmoored / Conversation with the storm” and now it is “dragging my feet” instead of “biting my tongue,” and he is content while she is adrift. Rain became storm. Then the third time: “If we cut to the chase would I still be running / Would it all fall apart as I left you there / If I stopped trying so hard would it all fade away, would it even be fair? / You shouldn’t take what I gave / Conversation with the grave” and “would it even be fair?” is the line that fucking got me because there is genuinely no good answer to it. And “you shouldn’t take what I gave” does not put the blame on him cleanly. She handed it over. She knows it. Storm became grave and she watched it happen.
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Ava said she wrote this “from the perspective of someone who wishes they could feel differently about the relationship they’re in.” God, that. Wishing you could feel differently is a brutal place to be and she just says it plainly. She goes on: “They almost try to convince themselves that they can fix what’s broken” and you hear that in every verse, this almost-convincing that keeps collapsing under its own weight, “but know they can’t soften the edges.” Four words that contain the whole damn thing. She is just someone who knows, and knowing without being able to act is its own kind of damage.
Ava Valianti is seventeen years old and writing from Newbury, Massachusetts. Seventeen! The way she can already break down young, feral, all-consuming love with this level of fucking detail is kind of wild in a “who hurt you and why are you this self-aware already” way. She blends pop, indie, and pop-rock influences into something that feels raw and polished at once. Her voice has this aching vulnerability that never tips into performance, it stays grounded even when the emotions are huge.
Those Notes app drafts are still there. I still have not sent the one from August. When you are young you think loving someone hard enough is the whole answer, that caring deeply is the same thing as being right for each other, and nobody tells you those are two completely different things until you are already in it. Ava figured that out at seventeen. She wrote a whole song about it, made it sound like a dream, and somehow that is the most honest thing anyone has done with this feeling in a long time.
