B-Side Guys

Between the creek rocks and the parking lot lights, between childhood memories and obituaries, Rhaina Yasmin’s “Moth Song” maps the territory where nostalgia meets grief. Like its namesake insect, the track circles around moments of illumination, drawn to memories that burn bright enough to guide but hot enough to harm.

The imagery unfolds like a photo album dropped in a creek – “collecting rocks” in one frame, “your little sister graduated” in another, each snapshot warped by the water of time. Yasmin’s attention to detail transforms simple observations into profound markers of change: “the radiator is still humming” suggesting both comfort and abandonment.

What’s particularly striking is how the song maintains its “childlike wonder” even while processing loss. The juxtaposition of June bugs swarming concrete with checking obituaries creates a uniquely American gothic pastoral, where everyday moments carry the weight of existence without buckling under it.

The chorus’s questioning – “where do you go/out back with the angels/or a lamp post” – perfectly captures that peculiarly modern experience of grief, where ancient beliefs about afterlife compete with more mundane possibilities. The uncertainty feels more honest than any definitive answer could.

Yasmin’s eye for detail serves the narrative particularly well in lines like “fragments of the river bend” and “in the back of an SUV,” grounding metaphysical questioning in tangible reality. Even at its most ethereal, the song maintains contact with the physical world.

The production maintains this balance between earthly and otherworldly, creating space for both concrete imagery and spectral suggestion. It’s the kind of arrangement that knows when to step back and let the lyrics cast their own light.

As the track progresses from personal memory to universal questioning, it maintains its intimate feel while expanding its scope. The final image of a moth “trapped in a parking lot” transforms from specific observation to perfect metaphor – all of us drawn to artificial light, hoping to find something genuine in its glow.

“Moth Song” succeeds largely because it trusts its listeners to find their own meaning in its carefully crafted scenes. Rather than forcing conclusions about loss and memory, it creates a space where personal grief can resonate with universal experience.

By the time we reach “I hope the lights are glistening,” Yasmin has created something that honors both the weight of loss and the persistence of wonder. Like its titular insect, “Moth Song” finds beauty in the act of searching, even when the light proves elusive.