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Zoë Pete Ford’s One Of The Guys is an album lost in time

Here is an album that swaggers. Here is an album that truly rocks, but sometimes goes inside of its own mind. Here is an album with both chugging, phased-out guitars and a tinge of harmonica. Here is an album both sincere and ironic, both loving and over it. Here is Zoë Pete Ford’s sophomore effort, One Of The Guys.¹

Certain parts of human life have been happening since the first of us roamed the Earth – so far back that loincloths hadn’t even been invented yet: love, betrayal, boredom, longing for another time in life, trying to find ways to get completely wasted. Things like that. Some other parts only came about after we figured out how to get wasted on alcohol² – like drinking in public, or being drunkenly in love with someone only to see them fall in love with someone else. Also, hangovers.

In many ways, One Of The Guys could be set at any given time after the invention of alcohol – but remove the alcohol, and the setting could be the aforementioned pre-loincloth epoch. The themes comprising this collection of nine swaggering, staggering-home-at-sunrise stories are evergreen and maybe even universal.

At times, the narrator doesn’t seem to know even what year she’s in. Take the first track: “Mint Juleps” features the line, “I may be Humphrey Bogart, but baby, I’m no Lauren Bacall.” If you’re not familiar with these names, that’s not surprising whatsoever. Bogart and Bacall were an iconic husband-and-wife duo of actors who played opposite one another in films like To Have and Have Not, a 1944 adaptation of the Ernest Hemingway novel of the same name.

Wait a second. We’ll come back to the “lost in time” thing. First, we have to figure something out. How did this reference end up on a scrappy Brooklyn indie artist’s album in the year of our lord 2025?

Well, that’s explainable: because this is a fundamentally literary record.³

If you look back two paragraphs, you’ll see the phrase “nine [ . . .] stories” substituted for what should ostensibly be “nine [. . .] songs.”

The first reason for that substitution is that every single track on this LP tells a full, complete story.⁴ We’re introduced to a character, a relationship, a situation, or a place, something happens there, and that something comes to an end of some sort.

The second is the number of literary references shuffled into the lyrics. Hell, the song “Mean Reds” is simply an episode from the novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s⁵ detailing the narrator knocking on the door of the all-time ultimate main character, Holly Golightly. The song characterizes Holly accurately to the book’s events, how she “knows just how to dress,” has scores of men waiting on her, how she came into town from far away; the title is a reference to a passage in which Golightly describes the opposite of the blues, the titular “mean reds” – a state of fear without knowing why you’re afraid.

The third is that the language employed on the record reads less like poetry, more like prose put to a melody and beat. Consider the opening line of “Billy/Bobby,” in which Ford states clearly, “Around me, you don’t have to act like you’ve never broken a pact before.” The rhyme of act and pact is almost ancillary; it seems like a mere coincidence of everyday English. What it really reads like is the opening of a written, rather than sung, story.⁶

These stories: What are they about? They’re not just writing exercises; they’re not literariness for its own sake; they’re not all retellings of classic books.

This collection is, to this reviewer, about the state of being in between things. In the lilting “One Of The Guys,” the white-t-shirt-and-jeans main character Carly is sometimes a “pretty girl,” sometimes “one of the guys.” Our Carly is also in a certain kind of fling with a girl named Jenny, who eagerly waits for Carly to knock on her door at night – yet we’re led to believe that Carly herself won’t commit to anything further. Between masculine and feminine, between love and mere sex.

Arguably the album’s most serious track, “Billy/Bobby,” (which begins with that line about having broken a pact), features a woman who’s with a man who “keeps [her] warm” (Billy), but whose “heart pound[s] fast” for another character, Bobby. In this anxiety-inducing, Built to Spill-esque tune, the woman (to whom the narrator is speaking in second person) tears herself apart, praying she doesn’t see Bobby at the bar,⁷ presumably because she knows she’ll be uncontrollably unfaithful to the man who’s such a comfort and boon to her, the unfortunate Billy.⁸

The in-betweenness abounds in almost every song, but in more than just subject matter – on the musical side, we see Ford & Co. oscillate betwixt serious, shit-kickin’ rock ‘n’ roll attitude on one hand, and disillusioned, slow-chord malaise on the other – often both at the very same time. The entire vibration of the record feels halfway between a modern, independently produced record and a 1960s, independently produced record. Some of the guitar licks feel pulled straight from a Chuck Berry songbook, and the drum sound is more akin to, say, a Jerry Jeff Walker record than it is to Wednesday or even an older Arcade Fire, or really anything modern. The production is raw and, though the term is overused to the point of triteness, “vintage.”

Which brings us back to time: One Of The Guys doesn’t know what year it’s in.

For one thing, the characters have names like “Billy,” “Bobby,” “Carly,” “Jenny.” These very well may be people Ford knows in real life, but they could be names from 80 years ago and no changes would have to be made. But this isn’t 20th century worship – not at all – because we also have characters named “Adam,” “Eve,” and “Saturn.”⁹ So we not only have recent-history names, we also have names which have been important for thousands of years.

On “Baby You’re Crazy,” she says of the Baby in question, “Got a picture in your mind that you see through a pinhole.” The last time this reviewer heard about a pinhole was while reading an Ansel Adams photography guide from 1980. It feels distinctively un-modern.

(Not in a bad way – none of this talk is derogatory. We’ll make that clear later.)

Another example is when “Over The Line,” a rolling song about a girl who’s fairly out of control (a theme amongst Ford’s characters), uses the term “mean misleader.” Now, this phrase traces back to blues culture. In the late 1920s, a century ago, singer Papa Charlie Jackson used “dirty mistreater” in a song; it was used in that state for years, when in 1934 both Leroy Carr and Tampa Red – piano-tinged bluesmen – recorded “Mean Mistreater Mama” and “Mean Mistreater Blues,” respectively. This isn’t exactly a term you’re going to read on your social feed, and yet Ford has flipped the phrase from “mistreater” to “misleader” – a more modern twist, and thus a three-quarter-century-later evolution of a folk phrase.

Which brings us back to the timelessness of themes on this album: Tampa Red, on the same “Mean Mistreater Blues,” sings, “A woman that you lovin’ has been lovin’ someone else.” A careful reader will note that this is the exact same premise, though from a different perspective, as “Billy/Bobby.” And if these things have been happening for 100 years, they’ve been happening for all of human history.

This is an album fraught with timeless misfortune and indecision. Its characters experience a severe lack of control, for both internal and external reasons, and it’s a type of un-control that is, to this reviewer, based in human nature. It’s baked into the experience of being a person.

The final song, “Kick The Can,” ties all of this together and brings us home: Ford reminisces about her early days of rolled ankles, kick-the-can, playing “jacks in the hardwood hall.” “Back then, I had nothin,’” she sings, then, “Back then, I used to have it all.” Compare that to now, with copious “bourbon and beer” in her modern life. She laments that a “buzzcut angel” she’s had her eye on is “buying drinks for the girl in the slip.” It feels like Ford finally realizing that she’s not in between anything: She’s past it, and now she’s in something else. She looks back, but she’s under no illusion that the past is ever going to come back to her. We the listeners are left, in hke’s opinion, with a silent question: Are we going to keep looking back in anguish? Or are we going to make the present what we want it to be?

Even when it’s emotional and forthright, there’s a sense of irony buried in this album’s sincerity; but the irony, contrary to conventional thought, conveys a different kind of sincerity – to be sarcastic about very real feelings, one must have first had those feelings. In this way, One Of The Guys both celebrates and triumphs over malaise and indifference. It makes a moral statement, one that isn’t bound to the 2020s. And because it isn’t tied to the present, it’s an album that could mean something to anyone at any time.

And it manages to mean quite a bit. If we can see the overarching nature of human experience, we can know that we are not alone – even and especially when we feel at our most alone. That, right there, is the power of a very good story. And such a story does Zoë Pete Ford tell on this wonderful LP.

1. Stylistically here, all words are capitalized in all titles, even articles and conjunctions. This review will honor that decision. ↩︎
2. Humans have always loved getting wasted on alcohol. Ancient Sumer, which sprouted up around 6-7000 years ago, invented the earliest known “walks into a bar” joke. It goes like this: “A dog walks into a bar and says ‘I can’t see a thing’. I’ll open this one.‘” No one knows what it means, but if you’re really bored and around drunk people, try telling it and acting like it’s the funniest thing in the world. The inebriated, with the right delivery, will find it hilarious. Anyway, point being, people have been drinking for a long time. ↩︎
3. This may be a stretch, but let’s look at “Mint Juleps” again – a bit of research fails to find any evidence of Bogart & Bacall drinking mint juleps, but it does yield the historical fact that the couple frequented a place called Musso & Frank Grill; another patron was one William Faulkner – literary giant and author of As I Lay Dying (among others) – who himself did drink mint juleps. If he didn’t like the way the bartender had made him one of these drinks, he would simply jump behind the bar and make one himself. It’s unclear whether Ford is referencing this connection, but based on what I’m about to tell you, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if she were. ↩︎
4. Author’s note: J.D. Salinger has a book simply titled Nine Stories, which has a similar feel to this release. If you like One Of The Guys, you may like that one. ↩︎
5. This Truman Capote novel is among the favorites of this reviewer. ↩︎
6. Another note here is that Ford is very specific, in a world-building kind of way. For e.g., anytime a car appears, she names the car. In “Mint Juleps,” it’s a Ford Ranchero; in “Saturn,” it’s a hatchback Saturn. The specificity does not feel wordy; it feels deliberate and realistic. ↩︎
7. Much of this record takes place in bars, around bars, coming home from bars, etc., but it doesn’t feel one-note. In every case, it’s more of a Tom Waits-style, meaning-laden bar than it is a Nickelback “party hard and rock out with your cock out” bar. ↩︎
8. Fun side-note: In the midst of the unbearably heavy atmosphere of this song, Ford sings in the background, “More kicks.” Maybe this means that Bobby beats Billy out in terms of fun, but the moniker for her band is “Zoë Pete Ford & the Kicks.” This could be a small, self-referential Easter egg. ↩︎
9. “Saturn” is a particularly interesting name choice. In the song (of the same name), Saturn is a guy who drives a girl around (in his own Saturn), but tells her, “I don’t want you falling for me.” The girl doesn’t have a license, because she can rely on Saturn to give her a ride basically anywhere – but Ford’s narrator ends the song by telling her “you better get a license, even with Saturn by your side.” It reads as if she’s telling her not to count on the guy, and to take control of her own life.
   Now, Saturn is an ancient god whose love life is anomalous in Greek/Roman myth: He was almost completely monogamous, which means that our character isn’t a womanizer or cheater (if we follow the mythology); instead, the god Saturn was superlatively worried about a prophecy that foretold his undoing by the hands of one of his children. He was so worried about it that he ate all the children his wife had, until she tricked him by feeding him a rock instead of the baby (this is all true, in the myth). The non-rock baby, Jupiter, did end up overthrowing Saturn (the god, not the ZPF character). So Saturn’s story is more about paranoia than it is about love. The symbolism here is unclear, if the name means more than just the make of Saturn’s (the ZPF character’s) hatchback. ↩︎