Behind The Tracks: Paco Is Desperate - Margaret (Single) (2020)

"Margaret" was written maybe a few weeks after our record Unraveled dropped in 2019. At the time I was living with our former manager, and I remember sitting on her couch with my acoustic tuned to FACACC messing around with chords and such. All of the sudden, the earliest incarnations of the song began to form. I remember showing our manager and some friends and such and y'know, they're saying the song is amazing and I'm kind of like eh, it's alright, it's whatever. Another musician compared the progression to a Bad Books song. Last year I went through a really awful breakup, just an incredibly toxic relationship I found myself in and I was really struggling with some post traumatic stress type stuff, so I started writing about this girl Margaret. 

Margaret is the malicious spiritual manifestation of the narcissistic and evil parts of an emotionally abusive lover. I walked around for months after that split feeling like I was in a daze. There was this cloud that hung over me, and any time things would get better, this shitty evil energy was there to remind me of how alone I felt. 

So here I have this acoustic song with this interesting Bad Books kinda chord progression and these deeply personal, symbolic lyrics and I took it to practice and we made it a whole song. We threw it into our live set just to see how people reacted. On multiple occasions I remember getting a crowd that was y'know, not super into what we were doing and kind of blowing us off, but the moment we went into Margaret it was like life got breathed into the room. I think it really resonates with people. I think most people have had a Margaret in their life before. 

A year later, we decided we wanted to finish this awful pandemic year on a high note, so we went to the studio and recorded Margaret. We really took our time with it and tried new things, did a lot of layering, added some upright bass for that orchestral flavor which was super awesome. All in all, I'm definitely very proud of how it came out. To see it continue to resonate with people, now with a music video too, has been really validating to me.