B-Side Guys

“Boys go laughing at heaven gate / girls go quiet for father sake,” two lines built on identical grammar, same verb structure, same rhythm, same rhyme scheme, and completely opposite outcomes. That symmetry is doing real work: Megan Winsor builds the couplet so the inequality shows up in the shape of the sentence itself, boys get noise and heaven, girls get silence and obligation, both delivered in the exact same grammatical breath.

The word “coven” gets the same isolating treatment throughout the song. It never sits inside a full line; it stands alone at the end of each chorus stanza, set apart the way a name gets set apart when someone’s calling it out. A coven is a gathering, several voices working as one, and the chorus enacts that gathering in miniature every time the word lands by itself after four lines of buildup.

Winsor has said the song grew out of her own experience being professionally villainized as an outspoken woman, and that the better response to a rigged trial is standing with other women, not running from the verdict alone. The bridge makes that literal: a shared room, a shared stake, one last breath split between more than one person. Even the imagery of being burned turns communal, a shared sentence, not a solitary one.

That instinct toward collective response tracks with how Winsor has built her career more broadly. She’s written a guide for independent musicians navigating the industry without major label infrastructure, spoken to young artists at GRAMMY Camp, and toured behind three albums while still finding time to advocate for other women doing the same climb. “Coven” reads like the natural song for someone who keeps choosing to bring people along.