With her last couple of singles, Ana Luna is crafting an intriguing story around relationships. They’re not straight-forward. They’re not perfect. And when they come to an end, it can be heartbreaking—not just for the person ending the relationship, but also for the person being told that it is over. On “Dance in a Trance,” for instance, Ana looks back on a relationship, wondering what was real and what was fake. She then followed up the single with “Daddy’s Empire,” where she explained more of the relationships’ imperfections. While she shared her side of the story on that track, there is always more to uncover, and Ana continues the narrative with “Can We Pretend We Just Met at a Bar?”
On “Can We Pretend We Just Met at a Bar?,” Ana describes the emotional complexity of letting go. Her vocals are expansive and powerful, but they also provide a melancholy richness to the layers of instrumentals. Against the piano and strings, she sings, “If only the past didn’t have a hold on us / And if only the future wasn’t daunting / But we both know the past has made a fool of us / So when will I be honest? / I wish that I was honest.” As much as she wants to believe that things weren’t so bad, she knows that she is better off on her own.
Giving us more details about “Can We Pretend We Just Met at a Bar?,” Ana shares,
“‘Can We Pretend We Just Met at a Bar?’ is a conversation with myself. It’s about blurring the past and present in order to get to the truth and begin letting go. In the song, I imagine how I wished things could be, faced how they actually were, and asked myself why I hadn’t walked away sooner. Deep down, I knew the relationship was over, but I stayed in denial.
“From the outside, it looked like love, it looked like it should work, and that illusion kept pulling me back. But inside, I was suffering. There’s a disconnect between the external and internal: the external hypnotizes you to stay, while the internal is begging you to face the truth that it’s all a façade, and there’s no future there.”
You can listen to “Can We Pretend We Just Met at a Bar?” here.
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