Alex Southey’s “Pitch” captures the tension between embracing life’s bleak moments and choosing to remain in them.
October and November are hard months for me. As the season circles back each year, so do the memories and events with which I struggle. Accepting that struggle can sometimes look like accepting that in many ways, life just sucks. It is hard. It is tiring. It’s unrelenting. As Alex Southey puts it, “life’s a b*tch”.
In his latest song, “Pitch”, Southey explores the difficult truth that while life remains challenging, there’s an unexpected richness in embracing that hardship. His intention, as he explains, is to offer a reminder that “it’s not all bad,” and that sometimes, “you may even find joy in how bad it can be.” The song and video are simple, alternating between minimalistic shots of water and flowers on a table. The song itself is anchored by emotive double-tracked vocals while the video’s dark-toned, lo-fi aesthetic complements this mood; emphasizing solitude and reflection and allowing the weight of Southey’s words to settle in and sink deep.
Empirically speaking, I know life isn’t always bad, but even writing that stirs a bitter, angry voice inside me that resists the optimism. Moreover, when life feels unendingly bleak, there’s a strange allure to pushing yourself further to rock bottom, as if to see just how bad it can get. It’s a familiar place—often, because it feels like what you know or believe you deserve. This tension between despair and discovery is what makes “Pitch” resonate; it doesn’t sugarcoat hardship or the choice to remain in it.
One of the few lines in the song—“Another said/ ‘Come home’ / And we respond, ‘Too bad’ / All night long” suggests a push-and-pull between a call for connection and a choice to reject it. The repeated request to “come home” nearly sounds like an invitation to return to a safer or more supportive place, yet responding with “too bad” implies an intentional decision to stay distant, even when connection is possible. In this, I found my self-destructive, self-sabotaging behaviors—resisting support, rejecting care, and reinforcing isolation—reflected back at me.
The song, with its strong acoustic guitar and layered string section, brings this concept forward gently, but its message may resonate differently depending on where you are on your own journey. “Pitch” leaves listeners with a message that’s as challenging as it is comforting: life’s lows are real and unyielding, yet they can carry a strange beauty worth acknowledging. For those of us familiar with these depths, “Pitch” doesn’t offer a fix, it simply meets us there, leaving us to reflect on what we choose to embrace and what we choose to resist.“Pitch” by Alex Southey is the first single from his upcoming 2025 LP, “Dogs Aren’t Great with the Weather Change.”
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