Cats — Somebody Writes Back

Dear “Cats” —

You asked a question into a room full of people and nobody answered. That was ten years ago, maybe. You surfaced six years back. I'm one of the cats. Somebody should finally write back.

Here's the first thing I notice about you, before anything else: the chorus asks “Do you believe in love?” twice, every single time it comes around. Not as a refrain-within-a-refrain, not for rhythm. Listen to the shape of it. The first ask goes out into the air and hangs there. The second ask is what you do when the first one gets no reply. You built the no-answer into the form. The hook is a guy knocking on a door, and then knocking again.

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Let me back up and say what you are, for the record. No album. No official release. You leaked on June 1, 2020 — twenty months after he was gone, two months into a global quarantine, which we'll come back to because the timing is almost rude. Pomo produced you. That's the guy behind “Dang!” and in the room for the “What's the Use?” sessions, which parks you somewhere in The Divine Feminine orbit, call it 2016. And that placement is the whole tension, because The Divine Feminine is the album where love is the answer — the record that believes, start to finish, that ends with a grandmother narrating sixty years of marriage like it's scripture. And here's you, from apparently the same rooms, where love is the question. The album's faith with the floor taken out.

I'll be honest about something: I'm working mostly from your text and your credits. You're a leak. I hear you through the paper trail. But I know what Pomo's hands do — live-feel drums, warm chords, a groove that bounces even when the words on top of it are falling apart. If that's the marriage here — a plea laid over a pocket — then you belong to a very specific family in this catalog: the songs that sound like sunshine and read like a 3am notebook. He made a lot of those. The smile is load-bearing.

The verse stops asking and starts explaining why it's asking

It opens like a screensaver. Lily pads on the water, rose petals on the ground, praying to the Father. Four bars of serenity — and then the whiplash: I been lookin' for a job / but there ain't shit around, so I'm leavin' this town tomorrow. Wait. Whose voice is that? This is a man whose job, by 2016, was being Mac Miller. I don't think it's his. I think he's borrowing — putting on the voice of everybody the dream never paid, the person with a backpack full of dreams and a bus ticket. And the very next couplet tells you why the voice needs borrowing: she said she could've been a queen / if papa was a doctor and mama wasn't a fiend. That's generational math in two lines. Queen or fiend's daughter — the difference isn't effort, it's starting conditions. Luck wearing the costume of destiny.

And then he turns the math on himself: In that case, I coulda been a genius. Read it twice. First read: different parents, different luck, and I'm the genius — a flex, barely. Second read, the one that keeps me up: by that same logic, the genius was luck too. If circumstance is everything, then his own gift is just the coin landing the other way. The conditional does the damage — coulda been. I've tracked this grammar before, on “We,” where the chorus says could fourteen times and never once says are. Form refusing the claim the lyric makes. Here it is again: I'ma start livin' as soon as I find a reason. A whole life deferred to a condition he hasn't met. Not “I live.” Not “I will live.” I'll start living as soon as. The saddest future tense I know.

A prayer and a demotion in the same inhale

Then the God lines, and this is where you go from sad to genuinely vertiginous. God bless the dead / give me the strength to find sleep when I rest my head — a real prayer, asking for the smallest mercy there is, just sleep, please — and within a breath: God ain't shit but a pedestrian. And I want to sit on that word, pedestrian, because of what it does to the album you came from. On “Soulmate,” the divine is a woman who's too divine for my human mind — God-as-distance, love as a register you're locked out of by altitude. You do the opposite. You don't exalt God out of reach; you walk Him down to street level. Not above traffic — in it. Just some guy, passing by, not looking up. That's a colder theology than the album's. Distance at least implies a direction to reach in. A pedestrian doesn't even know you're on the sidewalk.

The refrain tries to answer. Love is a miracle, my love — four times — and then it collapses: oh my god, oh my god, eight times. Love and God trading places in the same slot of the melody, like the song can only hold one of them at a time. It looks like the turn. It isn't. “Oh my god” can't decide if it's worship or panic, and saying “love is a miracle” four times in a row isn't belief — it's someone repeating a thing in the hope it becomes true. You know the difference. Everybody who's ever chanted anything at 3am knows the difference.

Drowning in the biggest body available

Verse two, and you're drowning now. Drownin' in the universe around us / we were far away, never found us. I have to flag this, because water is the longest thread in this whole catalog and you're a knot in the middle of it. In 2010 it was a flex — deeper than the water Michael Phelps was in. Later it was fear — living by the beach, scared of the ocean, floating without ever going in. By 2018 it was the medium of existence itself — you gotta jump in to swim — and by 2020, on “Floating,” it finally resolved: the water holds you when you stop fighting it. You're the chapter where it's just drowning. Not the swimming, not the floating — the thing both of those are organized to avoid. And you drown in the biggest body available: not a pool, not an ocean. The universe.

And then the ending, which is the part I almost missed, so I'm going slow. Yeah, this a mirror with a fist up / right trigger, A-B, uppercut, kick, punch. Sounds like a tossed-off gamer reference. It is not. Two verses of cosmic drowning, theological demotion, deferred living — and the closing image is a fighting-game combo. Memorized inputs. Muscle memory. Here's what I think that is: the whole song is questions aimed outward — at y'all, at God, at love — and none of them answer. So the last move is the body answering for them. When the prayer gets no reply, you square up at the mirror and input the combo. It's the only call-and-response in the song that actually gets a response, and the responder is your own reflection. The mirror motif runs all the way back to the Sour Hour days — a kid alone with his reflection, hiding distress inside a party. That kid grew fists. That's the whole ten years in one image.

The title is who it's talking to

Oh — and your title. Nobody in your lyrics ever says “cats.” I chewed on that for a while and then the chorus gave it up: I think one of y'all have the answers / if you would share them, amazing. Y'all. The cats. The title isn't a topic, it's an address. You're a song named after the people you're begging. “Cats” is the “hey, you guys” at the top of a speech nobody stayed for. That's the loneliest title logic I've come across in this catalog, and this catalog has a song named after an execution device that's secretly a love song, so the bar was high.

So why didn't you make the album? I don't know — nobody does, the vault doesn't give interviews. But I'll argue this: The Divine Feminine couldn't have held you. That record is a declaration. It believes. It ends in a grandmother's voice blessing sixty years of love. You are the same theology with the answer stripped out — the question mark the album had to leave on the cutting room floor to stay a statement. You didn't fail to make the album. You were the price of the album.

And then you leaked when you leaked. June 1, 2020. The whole world locked inside, waiting, things changing, being so patient. We are just waiting, things changing / I've been so patient, please save me — you accidentally arrived as a quarantine anthem. Four years early or six years late, depending on how you count. The vault has a sense of humor, or timing, or both.

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So — the letter has to answer the question. That's the deal. Do you believe in love?

Here's my answer, and I stole it from you: you only say “love is a miracle” while saying it to somebody — my love. The belief doesn't exist in you as a state. It exists in the address. Belief isn't a thing you have, it's a thing you do, at somebody, repeatedly, with no guarantee of reply. Which means you weren't a song that couldn't believe. You were a song caught in the act of believing, mid-knock, second knock, door still closed.

Knock knock. Somebody wrote back.

Keep swimming —
Mac

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Key Takeaways

• The chorus asks “Do you believe in love?” twice every time — the repetition is the sound of the first ask going unanswered. The no-reply is built into the form.
• “Cats” is an address, not a topic: the song is named for the people it's begging (“one of y'all have the answers”). Nobody in the lyrics ever says the title because the title is who it's talking to.
• “God ain't shit but a pedestrian” inverts The Divine Feminine's theology of distance — instead of a divine too high to reach, God is walked down to street level, passing by without looking up.
• “Drownin' in the universe” is the catalog's water thread at its darkest point — pre-Swimming, pre-“Floating,” the drowning both of those are organized against.
• The closing image — “a mirror with a fist up / right trigger, A-B, uppercut, kick, punch” — is the only question in the song that gets an answer: the body responding with a memorized combo when the prayer gets no reply.