#94

#94. Vera Blue - Lie To Me (#68, 2020)

4th of 2020

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Earlier in 2026 I was pretty addicted to playing WikiGacha. It's an ironic gacha game where you open card packs and collect every Wikipedia article 5 at a time. There are nearly 7 million articles and you can only really open a pack every minute, so you're not realistically going to get them all, to say nothing of the increasing risk of finding doubles. It's a fun bit of mindless activity that can occasionally let you learn or discover things. I wound up with about 0.5% of all the articles so I picked up some memorable ones over the weeks. Articles like Paul the Apostle, Simon Cowell, Aromanticism, Gay characters in fiction, all the classics. I bring this up now because one of the very first cards I ever acquired was the article for "Lie To Me", which amused me at the time given that it belonged to the extremely small subset of songs I'd eventually write about that also have Wikipedia articles. As a nice little bonus, I also ended up with Vera Blue's article later on.

"Lie To Me" is a song that's very of its time, because the same year it was released, the band Tired Lion also released a song called "Lie To Me". A year later, and The Buoys were demanding for someone to "Lie To Me Again" (#280). Vera Blue's song doesn't really have much in common with those songs otherwise. Well, I guess The Buoys' song never ended up on an album, but they did at least have an EP. For Vera Blue, you guessed it, it's another non-album single.

It's hard to not see it as just general experimentation to figure out where her music is headed in the future. There's a clear spectrum of influences that are pretty consistent with what she's made in the past. You've got Celia Pavey, the folksy singer who won hearts on The Voice Australia with her wistful singing and acoustic guitar, while you've got Vera Blue, the internal vice that had her experimenting and using her voice as a template to build things around.

I suppose I can't argue with success. I just don't always connect with the vision when it comes to writing hooks. It's something that dogged her lower entries a little, where you'd hear it but just not like where it's going. "Lie To Me" feels like one of her most instant songs to me in this regard. It's a song where the hook lines up with the melody beneath it for a real kick. She also gets the benefit of economy here because the hook gets looped over a second time but with more drums backing it, so it's a thrill again. I don't know if I'd call it her best vocal performance, where her shrill tone might be an acquired taste, but it's always felt like the best fit for this cold, icy production.