It’s been said that an album is a story and each song on it a scene. Dido’s follow-up to No Angel certainly is concrete proof of that. The story that she seems to be telling in Life for Rent is at times so frank and personal, one feels as if the lyrics are pasted pages from a journal combined with lines from private letters.
At first, there seems to be little connection between the songs. “White Flag,” the first single and first track, tells of a lover’s call for redemption and forgiveness. “Stoned” deals with self-numbing. “Mary’s in India” recounts how a platonic friend became a lover, after the mutual sadness over “Mary’s” unexpected abandonment drew them together. And there’s of course the title song “Life for Rent,” a life-evaluation with a great deal of pessimistic self-reflection.
It isn’t until “See You When You’re 40,” in which Dido expresses her disillusionment with a long-time love that the story comes to life.
In “Don’t Leave Home,” Dido sounds desperate and needy, like a composite of Glenn Close’s character in Fatal Attraction and Jessica Walter’s in Play Misty for Me. She purrs, “And I arrived when you were weak/I’ll make you weaker, like a child/Now all your love you give to me.” She grows even more frantic on “Who Makes You Feel,” the track that follows, as she dissects the increasingly disintegrating relationship: “I don’t touch you the way I used to/And I don’t call and write when I’m away/We don’t make love as often as we did do/I don’t mind if you come home late/I don’t ever ask you where you’ve been/I just assume there’s a problem will you tell me.”
Despite her pleas, the relationship ends, and she is slow to recover from the blow. In “Sand in My Shoes,” she sings, “And I can’t shake the thought of you/I should get on, forget you/But why would I want to/I know we said goodbye/Anything else would’ve been confused but I wanna see you again.”
She humbles herself one last time in “Do You Have a Little Time.” Does she want love or will she settle for friendship? She seems undecided. On one hand, she sings, “If you’re feeling low and lost today…/If you’re feeling stressed just try calling.” A couple of lines later, “You will find me standing by/Over here at the side of your life/I’d like to hold you still, remind you of all you’ve missed.”
By the time “The Land is Mine” -the tenth track- rolls, she’s decided that she’s ready to love again, but this time wiser and more self-reliant, she’s only willing to do so on her own terms: “This land is mine and I let you rule/I let you navigate on demand/Just as long as you know…this land is mine.”
In the final song, “See the Sun,” she establishes a new tone- as a woman who is now so secure in herself that she’s stable enough to pull another from the depths of despair she was in not too long ago. On that track she advises a friend recovering from alcohol abuse stemming from the death of a dear one, “I’m coming around to open the blinds/You can’t hide here any longer/My God you need to rinse those puffy eyes/Do you remember telling me you found the sweetest thing of all/You said one day this was worth dying for /So be thankful you knew her at all/But it’s no more.”
