There was a boy my sophomore year who made me breakfast. Not the morning-after performance of it, an actual habit, eggs and the good coffee and my name written on a sticky note when he left for an early lecture before I woke up. He remembered the names of my friends and my dosage and the fact that I hated cilantro. He looked at me across a dive bar like I was the most interesting thing in a room full of people trying very hard to be interesting. And I dumped him in October – cold and out of nowhere – because a man being that good to me felt like a con I hadn’t cracked yet. I was so certain he’d eventually figure out I wasn’t worth it that I beat him to the punch and detonated the whole thing first. He got engaged last spring. I found out from Instagram with a drink in my hand and a feeling in my throat I’m still not naming. Estella Dawn went and wrote a whole song about that exact flavor of beautiful fucking idiocy, and ‘Japanese Boots’ has been living in my head rent free ever since.
The song is intimate alt-folk that plays soft and gets its hooks in you slow – all atmospheric production and a vocal that sounds like a confession whispered an inch from your ear at 2am. It moves in cinematic little flashes – a real woman trying to talk herself out of the best thing that ever walked into her life because the goodness of it scares the hell out of her. Estella sets it sonically next to Phoebe Bridgers, Gracie Abrams, and Lizzy McAlpine, that lineage of women who can gut you with a half-whisper and make you thank them for it. A hot voice over production this understated will absolutely talk you into texts you swore you’d never send.
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She opens the whole thing on a fairytale she’s already side-eyeing. Estella sings “You came to save the woman in the tower / How brave if you / In your Japanese boots / Wearing a smile so bright / The flowers they bent for you / And I did too / Trust falls left me with bruises / Love made me look stupid,” and the way she clocks her own surrender is what gets me. The flowers leaning toward this man and her bending right along with them, helpless as hell about it. A hot smile and a good entrance have lowered more standards than tequila, and she knows it. That “how brave if you” has a smirk built into it, a woman charmed and suspicious in the same breath. And then the bruises. She’s been burned by trusting before so she’s bracing for impact while she’s still falling which is the most relatable damn thing a woman can do.
Her chorus is where the disorientation goes full body. She lifts into “But I stayed up all night / Falling for your eyes / Don’t ask me the color of anything / I don’t know / Is it alright if I show up late and I / Sit on your couch and you play me / The songs that you wrote about me,” and that refrain about not knowing the color of anything is the most accurate description of early obsession I’ve heard in fucking years. The whole world goes blurry and instinct yanks the wheel out of your hands. A man who writes songs about you and then plays them for you on his couch is a slow-burn seduction most people couldn’t survive, and the right voice over the right quiet production will talk a woman into staying the night every single time. She’s asking if she can show up late to it like she’s pretending to play it cool. Nobody’s buying the act, sweetheart.
That last stretch is where she runs, and it wrecks me every time. Estella delivers “You took me to the ballet / I left glitter in the car / Then I ran like you’d / Never seen a woman run before / It’s been months and your parents still ask / When I’m coming back around / But my feet won’t stop now / Wishing on people like stars / Never got me what I wanted / If I’m honest / You’re suspiciously perfect / And I don’t think it’s worth it / If I’m wrong but,” and good lord, the glitter left in the car undid me. Evidence of a magic night she fled from. His parents still asking about her months later is the gut punch, proof of how real and how good it was, and she bolted anyway because some women will sprint from a sure thing and call it self-preservation. Been there. Got the matching scar. That line about him being suspiciously perfect is the exact lie I told myself at twenty. When something feels too good, a certain kind of woman decides it must be a con and torches it before it can torch her. The verse cutting off on “if I’m wrong but” and just stopping is the smartest damn move on the track, because she doesn’t get to finish the thought. The doubt is the whole point.
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Estella Dawn racked up thirty million streams on her own, which is the kind of shit that should keep half the industry up at night sweating. Born in New Zealand and parked in San Diego, she writes and produces every bit of it solo, and it comes out so good you start wondering what everyone else is doing with their full teams and their fat budgets. Her sound sleeps somewhere between dark pop and indie folk with alt-country bleeding in at the corners, because she has never once given a damn about staying in a lane. “Detached,” “You Didn’t Text Me,” and her stripped-to-the-bone cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” have been making people fall apart in their cars for years, and she keeps proving she’s gloriously out of control in the best way. She delivers the whole hell of it with an honesty that makes you feel personally called out by a woman you’ve never met. She’s been doing this entirely her own way, and if you’re sleeping on her, that’s your own ass to sort out.
I never texted that boy back into my life. The window closed, the ring went on somebody else’s hand, and I made my peace with being the cautionary tale in my own story. But ‘Japanese Boots’ caught me red-handed, because Estella isn’t writing about a man who did her wrong. She’s writing about a woman who couldn’t trust a good thing and sprinted from it in glitter, and she had the guts to leave the ending open instead of pretending she figured it out. I know exactly the color of what I ran from. She’s still deciding. Honestly, I think she’s the braver one of us.
