Beginner Groceries

This is a bright, deadpan novelty indie-pop song about the moment a supermarket's sliding doors shut behind you and your entire personality stays outside. The hook is the confession that arrives every single time, sung without a shred of shame: "I forget what food I eat" 1.

The verses are three versions of the same blank-out. One is the list that dies at the door — seven things written at home, none of them in your hand by the freezer aisle 1. One is the late-night plea typed into a search box: "whats some beginner groceries i should look into" 2. The last is a text thread that goes quiet for four hours and then comes back with "Sorry I was mixing your hair products together to make a potion. Can u go back and get chips" 3. A pre-chorus admits the hard part is not the shopping. It is the forty minutes afterwards, at your own front door, holding three bags of ingredients with no idea what they are for.

The arrangement runs at 112 BPM on bright piano and keys, a rubbery bass, handclaps and compact drums, with one warm horn stab per chorus and a shaker ticking like a till. The verses are talk-sung, the hook opens up into a sung chorus with a small backing group answering it line for line, and the bridge drops away to a voice and a keyboard before the last chorus comes back in.

Play it on the walk to the shop while you compose a list you will abandon, in the aisle where you have now been standing for nine minutes, or on the way home with three bags and no plan for any of them. The wording stays close to the posts, so each joke arrives the way it did in the timeline. The source wording and the credit belong to @kr1k3t_, @blis5ful and @SamuelSaulsbury.