My brother’s wife is deep into astrology and she has this phrase she pulls out whenever anything goes sideways – Mercury Retrograde. She’d look at me very seriously over her wine glass and rattle off the list of shit that was about to go wrong, and I used to roll my eyes until Mercury Retrograde personally came for me. We’re talking sexting my ex by accident and then dropping my phone in the toilet trying to unsend it. Losing the goddamn USB charger for my vibrator – and what the fuck ever happened to batteries, by the way, because that was a perfectly good system. Losing power during a pivotal Bridgerton moment that I will not recover from. And discovering my car can actually hit 100mph right as the blue lights appeared in my rearview, which was absolutely a coincidence and I will die on that hill. Physically, Mercury retrograde is an optical illusion – the planet appears to move backward in the sky three or four times a year for about three weeks, and astrology treats it as a time to pause and reflect rather than push forward. I live for that shit as an excuse. What I didn’t have was a song that articulated what it actually feels like to be in that state and then claw your way out of it. Sarah Jayne Dixon’s ‘Retrograde’ is that song and it’s been sitting in my rotation since February like it was written specifically for my worst three-week stretch of 2026.
Sarah wastes zero time getting to it. “What have I been doing / Where did the time go / I was figuring it out / I wasn’t myself though” – okay but that last line. That’s the one we hold off saying for as long as humanly possible because saying it out loud makes it real. We’ve all been in that fog, functioning fine on the outside, telling ourselves some shit about why it’s okay. Sarah puts the story and the truth right next to each other and doesn’t blink.
Anyone who has been in that hole knows the next move. “I tried to control it / That only made it worse / Feel like I’m regressing” – the fucking misery of watching your own attempts to fix something make it measurably worse. I’ve been that person and it’s embarrassing as hell to admit. You grip tighter and the whole damn thing gets slipperier. Sarah doesn’t dress it up.
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Old habits are sneaky as fuck. “Reverting back to my old ways / Retrogress / I’m acting like I don’t know / What to do next” – playing dumb about your next move when you absolutely know what it is. That’s not confusion, that’s avoidance, and Sarah catches herself doing it in real time which takes guts to put in a song.
And then you hit the wall where you stop fighting it and just sit in the mess waiting for it to pass. “I’m wondering when it all will go away / Retrograde / Retrograde” – that passive exhausted place where you’re not doing a damn thing except hoping the feeling takes itself out. The repetition is a fucking surrender. Sarah’s been here and she’s not pretending it was cute.
This is where she stops waiting and decides. “I’m not gonna let it all just fade away / I’m gonna wake up and live my life today / Don’t wanna be sick and stuck in all this mess / Retrogress / Retrogress” – that decision hits hard because she earned it. We watched the whole slide happen and now she’s done with it, naming the thing out loud and cutting it loose. That kind of clarity takes a long fucking time to get to and Sarah got there.
Getting to the end of your own bullshit is not a straight line and Sarah knows it. “Make it out of this mess / Just progress / Just progress / This is the end / I’m done with it / Time to progress / It’s time to live” – she’s finally fucking done with it. The doubled-up insistence sounds like someone talking themselves off a ledge at 2am, which is the only version of this moment that actually works. Raw as hell and completely earned.
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Sarah got herself a vocal scholarship to college in California, graduated, and immediately decided the most logical next step was writing her own damn songs, which honestly tracks for a girl from Bettendorf, Iowa. She blends indie pop, alternative and folk into something that feels personal without being precious about it, and she’s been at it since 2019 building a catalog that keeps getting more interesting with every release. ‘Retrograde’ dropped in February 2026 and it’s the kind of track that makes you go back and dig through everything she’s put out before it.
‘Retrograde’ “explores themes of growth and improvement after being stuck for so long,” Sarah explains. “It’s a super fun, indie, vibey song with jazzy chromatic scales and nostalgic elements.” The chromatic description is accurate as hell – there’s a warm, slightly unpredictable quality underneath the indie pop that makes the emotional weight land without the song having to announce it. Getting unstuck is a much harder thing to write about than being stuck, and she pulled it off.
Mercury retrograde is brutal for girls like me who run on chaos and bad decisions, because suddenly I can’t even blame myself – the planet is literally moving backward and I’m just a victim of the cosmos. My brother’s wife texted me last week that we were coming out of it and I could feel the shift, she said. I was going to send her back an eye roll but I’d had ‘Retrograde’ on repeat all week and I already knew. Some stretches of your life are just the optical illusion – you look like you’re moving backward but you’re building up to something. Sarah named that feeling, turned it into a banger, and somewhere between the sexting incident and the speeding ticket I found the song that made the whole mess worth it.
