Cajsa Siik :: "Was I Supposed To"

There are always dreams of regret. It is the unique quality of the human imagination to transcend the limited realities of things as they happened and imagine what might have been, to create little factories of invisible sadness. The heartbreaking pop of "Was I Supposed To" comes from the mind and voice of Cajsa Siik, a Swedish songstress who directs herself at these horrible counterfactuals, a world that had a chance to exist and didn't. Allegedly written on a trip through Spain, a place built for both imagination and regret, the playful guitar and bass lean winsome into Siik's chilly vocal, especially on lines like, "there is place I know where beauty is made/where I am out of control." But "Was I Supposed To" is the opposite of chaos as a tiny, tidy snare arms the back beat in metronomic pace and Siik breaks her voice in and out of her upper register with trampoline-like ease. The closest analog is Moonbabies, though noticeably without the male vocal counterpart. It would be easy to feel regret, a missing part, but Cajsa Siik already has this market cornered. "You will miss me when I'm gone," she waxes with a straight-face, making what was plain even more obvious, the imagined possibilities sentenced to get worse with repeated listens, time and a vicious imagination.