The thing nobody warns you about wanting a person too much is how good it feels right before it hollows you out. I had this situation last year, and I’m using that word loosely, where I knew from the first night that this man was going to be a problem. The kind of problem you dress up for anyway. I spent months in that slow burn of wanting – the three-second pause before he texted back, the way a room felt different when he walked into it, the version of myself I turned into around him that was frankly a little unhinged and completely worth it at the time. And I kept telling myself wanting him this badly meant something. Turned out it just meant I was in deep and burning through myself to stay warm. Desire will do that to you. It wraps itself around you and it feels so goddamn good going in that you don’t notice what it’s taking until you’re already running low. Kavita Baliga wrote “Oh, Desire” for that feeling, and she wrote it so well I had to sit down when it came on.
The production is gorgeous and quietly unsettling – think London Grammar at their most atmospheric or Billie Eilish if she’d spent years training as a classical soprano before deciding to write something that makes you feel like it’s 3am and you can’t quite put your finger on what’s wrong. The track opens in stillness and unfurls slowly and the restraint is doing serious fucking work. It doesn’t rush you, which somehow makes the tension harder to sit with.
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She opens by giving desire a body and watching it come apart. “Oh Desire / You hide behind your smile / Your color fades / As you start to drown inside.” The smile hiding the drowning is a specific image and she earns it. Desire wearing a face, and that face is losing color. She’s watching something beautiful slowly go under and she can’t stop it. That’s not poetic shorthand. That’s the shit you feel when you’re standing in the middle of wanting someone so badly you can see it already turning on you.
Then she names what it’s costing her – “cause I need to rest / from the fire I confess / Cause I need to protest / and rage against this mess.” She’s exhausted and furious at the same damn time. She confesses to the fire which means she knows she fed it and she’s still raging about the mess it made. That kind of self-aware fury is more interesting than clean heartbreak. She let it in and she knows it. The classical soprano training gives her voice a control here that makes the emotional unraveling feel even more deliberate. She’s not losing it. She’s choosing to show you.
There’s a man I can think of right now who would absolutely wreck someone to this song – the kind who texts at midnight with just enough to keep you warm and makes you feel like the only person in the room and then disappears for four days and acts like nothing happened. This song is the soundtrack to figuring out you’ve been confusing intensity for intimacy. Those are not the same thing, and desire will absolutely let you believe they are for as long as you’re willing to feed it.
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The final section is where she lays the full accounting out. “Oh Desire / The bruises on your skin / Oh the shadows in your eyes / As you face the scars within.” Goddamn. She gives desire a body and then shows you what that body looks like after the bill arrives. The bruises and the shadows aren’t dramatic flourish they’re the actual cost of wanting someone who was always going to leave damage. She doesn’t flinch and she doesn’t soften it and that’s what makes the whole thing so hard to shake. I’ve been carrying this song around all week and I’m not even a little sorry about it.
Kavita Baliga trained as a classical soprano and earned her master’s from The Boston Conservatory which tells you something about her precision with sound. She built her career working with A.R. Rahman, the Grammy, Academy Award, and BAFTA-winning composer, touring Europe and India with him on international film and stage productions. She collaborated with director Shekhar Kapur and sound designer Alan Meyerson, toured France with Ollivier Leroy, and founded Desi Music Entertainment, an independent label she built to support South Asian artists and non-film music from India and Nepal. “Oh, Desire” is her latest single, and it arrives carrying the full weight of a career that spans continents, concert halls, and apparently, our most inconvenient feelings.
That situation eventually ended the way those things do. Not with clarity, just with exhaustion. I stopped feeding the fire and started paying attention to what was actually left standing. Kavita doesn’t hand you a resolution either. She shows you the bruises and the scars and leaves the rest with you. Hell, maybe that’s the most honest thing a song about desire can do.
