Song Analysis

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You can’t help who you fall in love with. People do it on accident all the time and it’s not always a romantic dream. “Good Looking” by Suki Waterhouse is a reflective song about how impossible it is lifting the veil from over your eyes when you’re in love with someone who hurts you. She tells a story of completely losing yourself in another person and drowning in their euphoria till it kills. Love can be beautiful thing but with the wrong person it can change the course of your life for the worst.

Waterhouse sings about this experience like waking up from a bad dream. The psychedelic indie song resonates with younger audiences because it’s common for a first love to fit this destructive criteria. The first verse poetically describes this immense tidal wave of emotions rushing over the girls mind. “Tides thrash inside, baby, I’m high octane / Fever in a shock wave / My core vibrates in an opium haze / Yet you think we’re the same.” I love how the lyrics create an equilibrium of positive and negative. It’s a high but a fever and it’s a haze but it’s opium. Waterhouse does a great job of painting this picture of her two sides fighting so fiercely. Her head is spiraling full of insecurities, lust, exasperation, and devotion. You can’t live with him but you can’t live without him.

The song itself is reminiscent and evocative. It brings the listener into the present by looking back on the past with a clear mind. Her reality had an earth-shattering shift when she realized how unhappy she truly was with him. “The skyline falls as I try to make sense of it all / I thought i’d uncovered your secrets but, turns out, there’s more.” All this girl cared about was how intoxicated she was with this person and screw any doubts about his character. Looking back, she is having trouble wrapping her head around how naive she was. How could she have let this happen? Everyone learns this lesson at least once. Love will blind you from the nefarious.

I think the reason Waterhouse focuses on the good-looking aspect of this boy is because after all this it’s the only nice thing she can say about him. The secret he was hiding could have been anything from cheating to being manipulative but after everything her first urge is still to speak well of him despite all he took from her. I think it’s common to look back and remember the good, even in the most dire circumstances. The side of herself that loved him is still there however defeated.

You can hear how droopy and tired her words are as she sings, “Play casino holes of my eyeballs / Roll the dice on my thighs / You stopped for a breath and I sped up / Just to impress you.” Relationships are hard work and it’s clear she was picking up the slack he kept handing her. The casino references could be two things. One, it could be her asking him to take a chance on her. It’s common for someone in an oppressive relationship to ask for forgiveness when they have done nothing wrong. Two, is that she is saying he can take whatever he wants from her, even use her eyeballs as holes in his casino. She wants to be his everything. She knows at this point that she is giving too much but she doesn’t care. Lost in the opium haze, she keeps chasing the high.

By the end of the song, we are back in the present with her vanished identity. She realizes how little there is left of her. It’s time to rebuild from the wreckage which is an intimidating feat. “You’re not who you are to anyone, to anyone, these days / I’m not who I am to anyone, no, not me at all.” It can be a scary thing to look in the mirror and not recognize the person looking back. The first step to recovery is processing everything that happened and that is exactly what this song is all about. Being hurt in love is a part of life and healing from it will only make you stronger.