I spent four months doing the actual work. The unglamorous kind. I cut out the guy who’d spent a year making me feel like my needs were a burden and my personality was too much. I went to therapy for the first time as an adult and cried through the whole first session about something I’d been lugging around since I was sixteen and called it progress. I stopped folding myself into smaller shapes in rooms where I’d always taken up less space than I deserved. I started eating again without the running commentary in my own head, felt my body fill back out and actually belong to me, which is one of the most unexpectedly erotic things I’ve ever experienced, inhabiting yourself fully after a long stretch of self-erasure. After all of it, four months of quiet, messy, private work, I ran into a coworker in the parking garage and the first thing out of her mouth was “you look amazing, have you lost weight?” I smiled. Said thank you. Drove home turning that question over, because the real answer was: everything changed, and you’re looking at the wrong fucking thing. May Dae wrote ‘Am I Pretty?!’ out of that same place, and from the first second it burns with recognition.
The song opens with a question that sounds simple until it starts working on you. “I’m pretty, Quiet. / Or am I… quite pretty? / Depends who’s talkin’ and how much they pity / They like me best when I sit real still / Painted lips, and a voice they can kill.” That pun in the opening line is so goddamn smart the way both readings coexist and let you decide which cuts harder. Who determines which version of you is real depends entirely on who’s in the room and how generous they feel that day. She’s describing the arrangement – look the way they want and keep quiet about the rest and we’ll decide you’re worth the attention. She names it in five lines and moves the fuck on.
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Then the song gets into the body and the temperature shifts. “When I whisper my needs through a smile / When I bite my tongue in style / are you mesmerized?” There’s so much physical containment in those lines. Suppressing what you actually want and presenting it through a smile is a full-body act, jaw tight, throat doing invisible work to keep everything below the surface. She takes it further by making the self-silencing elegant, practiced, something she’s done so many times it has its own style now. The “are you mesmerized?” is where she turns the whole thing around and aims it back. Women know what it feels like to make someone lose their composure with nothing but controlled, devastating presence. Hell, it turned me on and I’m not even in the room. That question is her asking whether performing desire on a leash is doing it for you. Because she already knows the answer and she’s done caring about it.
Boredom sets in by the second verse, and boredom is more corrosive than rage. “I’m pretty bored in a room full of eyes / chasing for the next big thing in designer disguise / I’m pretty tired of being trimmed to size / i’m biting back truths just to be ‘polite’.” The word “trimmed” is doing serious damage. She’s describing active reduction of herself to fit what the room requires, and she couldn’t give less of a damn about it anymore. The room around her is full of people in their own curated performances of acceptable. She sees through all of it. She’s past outrage, past the stage where it even feels worth being angry about, which is the specific kind of exhaustion you reach after enough years of the same performance.
The chorus rips it all the way open. “Am i pretty?! / Pretty torn, pretty wild, pretty entertaining, / Pretty soft, pretty kind, pretty done behaving, / Kickin’ dust, give me hell, keep underestimating, / Good girl, bad attitude, Pretty Miss Understood.” She runs “pretty” through every adjective the world has layered onto her, and then at “pretty done behaving” she torches the whole list. The production goes loud as hell here, full Americana-rock guitar, and May Dae’s voice opens up and stops whispering. Keep underestimating her. Give her hell. She’s clocking out of the performance entirely and informing you, casually, that she finds it tedious.
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Then the bridge, and it cuts straight through. “i’ve got these bitemarks on my tongue again.. i did it for you / i’ve got the stretchmarks but i’ll cover them, what else could i do? / i’ve gotten blonder / more skinny but stronger / i’ll get younger just for you.. am i pretty?!” May Dae wrote this after losing a significant amount of weight during a difficult period, and while she was going through something real, the response she got was compliments on how she looked. She went blonder. Got smaller. Covered the evidence of what her body had actually been through and people called it beautiful. That tiny admission over the bitemarks is fucking devastating, because she’s naming what so many women do without ever naming it – the constant, quiet damage of performing prettiness for an audience that will never actually see you. The final “am i pretty?!” is the question aimed back at everyone who ever chose the surface, and it makes them sit with what that choice costs.
May Dae is the stage name of Belgian singer-songwriter Margot De Proft and she came out of the gate swinging with debut single ‘Levy Ride,’ a country-rock firecracker that critics immediately compared to Sheryl Crow which is frankly a damn good place to start. She writes alt-pop with a country heart and a rock edge – songs that read like diary pages you were never supposed to find, raw and honest and full of the kind of shit most people are too scared to put in a song. She broke up with someone and wrote a whole folk album in a week. A fucking week. That’s not processing, that’s weaponizing your feelings, and we respect it completely. Influences run from Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan to Miranda Lambert and Alanis Morissette, which tells you everything about the kind of woman she is: soft enough to make you feel something, sharp enough to cut you with it. She’s already racking up press across Europe and if her trajectory holds, Belgium is about to export something seriously good.
A couple of months after the parking garage my coworker asked how I was actually doing. Holiday party, two glasses of prosecco in. I told her the real version, all of it, and she looked genuinely surprised that there had been anything under the surface. May Dae already knew. The question “am i pretty?!” has a body count, and it’s not hers.
