Loose Buttons recently packed New York’s Russian and Turkish Baths, a 134-year-old East Village bathhouse, for a phone-free secret show that sold out in under an hour. The four lifelong New Yorkers clearly like their music shared in the same room, and “My Gemini,” a preview of the album You Came To See Magic, builds toward the smallest version of that idea.
First, though, the song is full of doubles. The narrator’s partner is a Gemini, the zodiac sign named for the mythological twins Castor and Pollux and tied in astrology to a split nature, and he pictures her staring into a mirror, which doubles the twins all over again. She’s one way one day and different the next, and he has made his peace with it: “I’m the guy that likes it when she’s like that.”
Around that confession, the lyrics take stock of a messy life with good humor. Some friends keep dating younger, others can’t hold onto anyone, and the narrator calls himself a talent show winner faking it as a singer while she’s off at fashion week. The refrain sums up their nights as singing and drinking until the whole thing turns into a fight at dawn, and the song keeps circling back to it the way the couple keeps circling back to each other.
Late in the song, the lyrics twice flash to a headphone splitter, the little adapter that lets two people plug into one device and hear the same music at once. The second time, the memory finishes itself: she sang along to Springsteen, and the narrator didn’t mind. After all the twins, mirrors and fights, that shared pair of earbuds is where the relationship holds, and a refrain this chantable seems made for a crowd yelling it back, exactly the kind of room Loose Buttons keep filling.
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