Florence Arman Picks Up the Pieces of Heartbreak in “Good Girls”
Photo: Marcella Ruiz Cruz
If a little melody mellows the pain after a breakup, taking the brittle emotions and purging them with punchy pop, then “Good Girls” is the perfect salve for your heartache. Florence Arman may have only a few releases to her name but music is deeply rooted in her persona, a calling she describes as inevitable, a form of musical predestination.
Arman started fiddling around with music, literally with the violin, at seven, fostered by a multigenerational family of musicians who thankfully encouraged her to seek success outside the arts. Gifted an MP3 player by her songwriter and producer brother, she was inundated with early influences, particularly Avril Lavigne. Arman started experimenting with writing songs but given her proclivity for schooling, was still pathing towards university and academia. That all changed when she decided to take a semester off and expel the reservoir of music within; many years later and she’s been channeling her unique voice, perspective and lineage into soulful, nuanced melodic gifts of songs.
“Good Girls” is a song that took many years to come together, a yarn unraveling from a horrible relationship, a horrible partner into emotive ingredients that melange themselves into pop pleasure. For a song whose genesis is so wrong, Arman along with her older brother as co-writer (yes the same one who gifted her the MP3 player) took the “sheer urgency” of the source material and crafted a song that is jarringly catchy for the pain it is meant to purge. The song is notable for many reasons, including being the first song she’s collaborated on with her brother, but also for its haunting lyrical content, washed up against a backdrop of inflective, energetic sing-along choruses.
It also bodes well for the future tracks on her upcoming album. While Arman may not have been the good student her parents wanted, nor the good girl to an imperfect partner, what can be happily shared about "Good Girls" is just how good of a song it is.
Watch the "good girls" video below:
