Somewhere between the third sleepover and the first toothbrush, my brain once promoted a man from “fun for now” to future husband without consulting either of us. I had us in a sunlit apartment with the good couch, and I’d already decided he was going to pretend not to care which dishes we bought while secretly caring a lot. Meanwhile, the actual man was still taking six fucking hours to answer a text. That is the humiliating shit your brain does when you fall hard. You can build a whole damn life around somebody who has barely shown up for the current one. I kept polishing the fantasy because it felt better than admitting the guy inside it had stopped matching the floor plan. Lizzy Donzis drags that private humiliation into the light on american dream, where she has already chosen the man and built the future before realizing he keeps choosing somebody else. The song hurts because the dream belongs to her long before the breakup does.
Producer Jordan Reifkind gives that fantasy enough beauty to make the collapse hurt. Violin and piano open the song with this cinematic softness before guitar and drums start putting pressure underneath it. The arrangement keeps flirting with a bigger pop release, then holds back from giving Lizzy the clean payoff she probably deserves. I love that choice because heartbreak rarely gives you a satisfying fucking beat drop right when you need one. Sometimes you are stuck in the pretty part while everything underneath it is going to shit. Nathaniel Wolkstein’s strings make the romantic dream feel expensive enough to believe in, which is important when the whole song is about realizing you built something gorgeous around a guy who keeps acting cheap.
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Once you have already chosen him in your head, every little betrayal starts feeling like damage to the whole life you imagined. Lizzy opens with “I bite my tongue i watch you speak to her like she’s priority” and there it is. She sees another woman getting the version of him she thought belonged to her. Then comes “But you chose her and I chose you / And it turned into something blue,” which is such a nasty imbalance because Lizzy has already told us where her loyalty went. She picked him. He did not return the favor. I know that feeling of wanting to blame the other woman because she is standing right there and somehow easier to hate. Meanwhile the man is the one making the fucking choices.
His behavior around his friends makes the whole thing uglier. Lizzy sings “You act so different round your boys / You drink you act so happy / You grab mе without asking / Who said that shits attractive.” That switch from private boyfriend to public asshole is its own special form of whiplash. A guy can make you feel wanted in private, then spend an entire night performing like your existence is mildly inconvenient once his friends show up. The grabbing line kills whatever romance was left in that moment because she is naming a boundary he crosses while apparently expecting her to find it hot. She does not. Neither do I. There is nothing sexy about somebody deciding access to your body comes with the relationship package.
All of that makes the chorus feel less like a breakup and more like foreclosure on a future Lizzy already built. “It would be nice if it was us against thе world / You would be mine and there would be no other girls” is the dream in its cleanest form. Then she admits “Then the American Dream I made is not for me.” Made is doing the heavy lifting. She designed this shit herself. The perfect couple and the guy who chooses her were already standing inside it. Losing him means watching that whole imaginary life get condemned. I’ve stayed attached to a future longer than I stayed attached to the man who was supposed to live in it, because apparently my brain is happy to protect the floor plan after the tenant has become unbearable.
Her jealousy gets wonderfully undignified with “Grab my pearls as she walks by / Wish she didn’t catch your eye.” Thank fuck Lizzy does not pretend she has transcended comparison. She is watching this woman and feeling insecure because that is what people sometimes do when the person they love starts looking elsewhere. Then she drops the line that cracks the whole song open: “But I’m still pretty / I’m still strong / I still need you like a god.” Girl. Knowing you are hot does not immunize you against emotional dependence. Strength does not magically delete attachment either. Lizzy can know her worth and still have this man sitting on a pedestal she admits she had to climb. That is messy as hell and far more interesting than pretending self-esteem makes heartbreak behave.
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Once the anger finally catches up with the fantasy, Lizzy stops protecting him. “You were the one who broke my back / You were the bitch you stole the show / Your not a man you were a coward / So just take your shit and go” finally points the rage where it belongs. Calling him the bitch is especially satisfying after so much energy spent watching another woman. Then she gives us “Spill my guts to all the world who gives a fuck if they come back / I’ve been broken once before I got up a thousand tines / I’m exhausted its my right.” That last confession is the one I believe most. She has recovered before. She can recover again. Right now she is tired, pissed off and allowed to fucking stay there for a minute.
Lizzy Donzis is a Los Angeles singer-songwriter and actress who started writing songs as a kid after a therapist suggested songwriting as another way to process anxiety. That origin makes sense when you hear how willing she is to leave the ugly emotion in the room instead of cleaning it up for company. Her catalog has moved through pop with darker electronic edges, and american dream gives her a bigger emotional canvas without sanding down the insecurity. Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black was an early influence for her, and you can understand the attraction to writing that lets a woman sound jealous or devastated without asking her to become inspirational before the song ends.
My imaginary future with the guy who barely deserved a drawer never made it past my own head, thank hell. The embarrassing part was realizing I missed the version of us I invented more than I missed him. That is where american dream gets me. Lizzy built herself a beautiful life around somebody who kept showing her he was a lousy foundation, then had to watch the whole thing crack before she could admit the house was never hers. She is still pretty and strong but also exhausted as fuck. Sometimes that is what waking up from the dream actually looks like.
