Love, BB’s “Solitaire” works against its own advice. The minor-key structure and Brooke Backman’s delivery hold the pose of a woman who has decided to stop gambling on love, but the card game metaphor refuses to stay clean: solitaire is still a game, still played alone, still lost. The lyric splits at its center. The first half offers the logic of retreat, “at least the rules are fair,” the comfort of a game with no opponent. The second half collapses it. Running out of cards, playing in the dark, falling apart, a game you lose before you start. Counsel and wound are the same object.
Michael Leviton wrote the song at the end of a relationship that ran through his entire twenties, and that weight sits inside the structure. The jazz idiom, minor key, torch phrasing, the grammar of Lorenz Hart, gives the material a form built for performance and distance. What the lyric does is use that distance to say something it could not say plainly. The game is the cover story. The dark is where the actual song lives.
