I was clearing out my camera roll last week—trying to free up storage space—when I stumbled across an entire album of me and my former best friend. Halloween two years ago, that road trip to Nashville, her birthday dinner where we stayed out until 4am. I sat there on my couch for twenty minutes just staring at this person who used to know everything about me, who I’d have trusted with my life, and tried to remember the exact moment she decided I wasn’t worth keeping around anymore. Couldn’t pinpoint it. That’s the fucking worst part—when someone who was your entire world just gradually decides you’re disposable. KAYTIE gets it. ‘Evil Person’ lives in that exact space of betrayal and confusion and justified rage.
The Cincinnati songwriter wrote this track at 20 after a friendship disintegrated in real time. “We weren’t talking at all, and she seemed to disagree with everything I said,” KAYTIE explains. “There became a point in time where I was just fed up with her actions.” And instead of texting paragraphs at 3am that she’d regret, she sat down at her piano and channeled all that rage and hurt into three and a half minutes of alt-rock catharsis.
KAYTIE made the deliberate choice to frame a friendship breakup like a romantic one. Sometimes losing a best friend is a breakup. The track opens with that immediate gut-punch: “Had me wrapped around your finger / Said that I wasn’t the type to linger.” There’s this vulnerability in admitting you were that devoted, that available, that convinced this person saw something special in you.
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The production starts deceptively soft—just piano and her voice, intimate and almost confessional. Then it builds. KAYTIE’s been writing songs since she was 12 (350 originals and counting), and she knows how to structure emotional escalation. When she gets to “But when you said, ‘Here’s a surprise’, I fell for your lies,” you can hear the bitterness creeping in. She’s not sad anymore. She’s pissed.
And then comes my favorite lyrical moment: “Said that I was the right one for you / Perfectly crafted just like a tattoo / Inked into my skin, you let me in.” The tattoo metaphor captures both permanence and pain. This person didn’t just matter to her—they left a mark. They got under her skin, literally and figuratively.
The pre-chorus is where KAYTIE lets the resentment fully surface. “Suddenly, I was the one in the wrong and / Suddenly I was your biggest problem / Suddenly I was the one you loved; you stopped taking me out to lunch / And then I see you out with her…” That casual “stopped taking me out to lunch” detail? It’s so specific and mundane and painful. The little rituals that made you close are just… gone. And she’s already replaced you.
By the time we hit the chorus, KAYTIE’s fully in her anger era: “What about when you said that I was perfect / What about when you said that I was worth it / Now you’re saying the same thing to her, acting like I was never your girl.” The repetition of “what about” demands accountability. It’s all the questions you want to scream at someone who rewrote your entire history together.
Here’s where the production does something fucking brilliant: KAYTIE threw in a change from D minor to E minor at the last minute. She says it represents “the tension building between me and my best friend,” and you can feel it. The song literally shifts under your feet, unstable, uncomfortable. That’s what betrayal feels like.
The bridge gets vulnerable again before the final explosion. When she sings “When I was the one, you said you weren’t playing dumb / That we could make a team, higher my self esteem,” there’s this painful admission that she let this person affect how she saw herself. And then the self-awareness: “But my expectations were just too high, to assume you were really that guy.”
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But KAYTIE doesn’t stay in that self-blame space. The final chorus goes full scorched earth: “You lied to me, you lied to me / Evil person, stupid and worthless / Spread your lies, you aren’t even worth it.” Sometimes you need to call someone what they are, even if it’s just in a song.
KAYTIE’s entire approach to songwriting is visceral and immediate—she says each song takes her 30-40 minutes to write, starting with piano chord progressions and letting the melody and words flow simultaneously. You can feel that rawness in ‘Evil Person’. This isn’t overthought or overproduced. It’s just honest, messy, justified rage.
At 20 KAYTIE’s already figured out what some artists spend careers searching for: how to turn pain into something that connects. “Connection is what I strive to achieve as a singer/songwriter,” she says, and damn if she doesn’t achieve it here. We’ve all had that person. The one who made us feel seen and then made us feel crazy. The one who promised permanence and delivered nothing.
Look, I’m not saying you should text your ex-best friend this song with no context. But I’m also not saying you wouldn’t be justified. Sometimes the best closure is knowing someone realizes they’re the villain in your story. KAYTIE wrote the soundtrack for that realization. She did us all a favor.
