What Is It All About? A Dissection of Bruises Off the Peach By Ryan Beatty
BY ADDISON MCNEILL
The opening track of Ryan Beatty’s second studio album, Calico, is a letter to oneself about the courage it takes to be alive and go through the—at times—monotonous pattern of keeping oneself afloat. “Ribbons” talks of the beautiful distraction that love can be for someone blind to it, but Beatty asks himself if he is willing to move on when love fails and answers this question with a characteristic flippance. The song ends with a wave of vocals, strings, piano, and electronic flair that feels like strolling into the nostalgic and raw world of Calico. “Bruises off the Peach” opens with a muffled string instrument in the distance, growing closer to the listener as it drones. Almost immediately, a simple acoustic guitar-picking pattern kicks in. This song is faster paced, higher in key. It opens with the line, “Something is missing / but that’s alright, I promise.”
“Bruises off the Peach” is a song about self image in relation to love, a theme that is ever-present within all of Beatty’s work. Ryan Beatty himself is the aforementioned peach, cutting off pieces of himself in order to survive or, rather, thrive. But is he cutting out the pieces of himself that he doesn’t like or don’t appeal to others, or is he cutting off the pieces of himself and his past that no longer serve him, freeing himself of fears that hold him back?
Beatty seems to paint a picture of a subject (likely romantic partner) who haunts his mind but is near impossible to please. He suggests right at the start of the song that the subject is not someone he is currently with as he declares “You couldn’t have me if you wanted.” However, he clearly has history with his muse considering lines like, “There you go again with all your needs.” and “Love will always last / love will always hold me down.” It seems as though he hasn’t recovered from this person’s impossible expectations of him. He still holds the love he had for this person, painstakingly so, but he knows that they cannot function healthily together. The song is not a cry to be taken back or finally loved wholly; rather, it approaches a statement of independence.
My favorite line in the song is one that I originally misheard. After describing the actions he takes to protect himself and declaring that this person has and will always ask for more, he asks “What did it ever have to do with me?”. Originally, I heard, “But did it ever have to do with me?”I thought that Beatty was wondering if he and his lover had equal impacts on each other. I thought that he was begging the other to say that any pain they caused was in the name of love and care for Beatty. However, with a simple rephrasing, I saw the lyric in a new light.
Beatty suggests that this person’s actions and the outcome of the relationship isn’t because of his own shortcomings, but rather because this person is not capable of fully giving their heart to another. I imagine that Beatty almost laughs this lyric, easy to picture with his breathy tone of voice. Whether he has cut out the problematic pieces of himself or foregone the assumption that he did anything wrong in the first place, he knows now that it may never have been him at fault.
After listening to “Bruises off The Peach” while crying in the car on lengthy drives to the mountains or on repeat in my room while I tried to write something meaningful, it became my most streamed song of the year. I had the privilege of hearing it live in March. The concert was more like a religious gathering, an audience full of young queer people being quiet not because they had to in order to stay safe but because they were safe. Brushing up against the shoulders of strangers, I sang along in a hushed tone with the urgency of a woman on her death-bed making her final remarks. Not only did I love these lyrics, I needed them. I watched them swirl out the mouth of the author, eyes closed and back hunched in focus. Swaying there in a kind of congregation he gathered, watching him relive the most vulnerable moments of his life, my love for him as an artist cemented.
I’ve decided that the bruises themselves are the things Beatty has been through, calluses developed to ensure recovery from a love that still refuses to die. When I listen to the song, I make a small promise to myself that I will shed the past experiences I let haunt and color me. Beatty says that after this process, the peach is “Not as beautiful, but still as sweet,” as if to acknowledge that the process of healing has been messy; this new version of himself may not be optimally desirable. However, what remains is the core of who he is and the value he possesses as a human being; that is something that cannot be taken from him.
The message of “Bruises off the Peach” is something of an ironically hopeful declaration that one can spend forever trying to decide what they could’ve done to save a relationship, but sometimes there is nothing to be done. Sometimes, the only way forward is peeling away a dead love’s hardship despite your love for them. Beatty suggests that you cannot let your “sweetness”—the love you possess for yourself and offer others—falter because someone didn’t value them. Sometimes, it really does have nothing to do with you.
