Mackenzie Scott, the woman who is TORRES, splits us completely in two. She cleaves us here, with this rendition of "Come To Terms," a song that shows the Nashville songwriter as the philosopher, as the adjusted - though still shaky -- collector of emotional debts, as the pained remainder of something that used to feel much better. She navigates through that moment of reluctant clarity, where it's finally been determined that nothing is going to get better in this relationship and there's just one door that you're going to have to leave through. It's neither forked, nor softened around the edges. It's brutal and it's jagged, but once through those doors, the light on the other side might get favorable again. It's never anything that you can count on, but you've simply got to take your medicine and go through with the hard thing.
She sings on that song, "These lives are so contrived/And out of focus/But if I can derive some happiness from this/Then I'll have made it out alive/'Cause people always change/But ain't always changing for the better/And just because the two of us will both grow old in time/Don't mean we should grow old together/So I'll be sure to turn my back on everything you said you'd do/I'm gonna come to terms/Before I have to/Been keeping all my time in my back pocket/Taking from it only what I need to be/Whoever I'm supposed to be/But when I look at you I get so lonely/I used to just adore you/But now you bore me/'Cause people always change/But ain't always changing for the better."
It's a song, like most of the rest of her songs, that calls into the ring the myriad of things that are swirling about in heads and hearts and it brings them all to a boil. They are meant to be poked and when they are, there's an expectancy of displeasure. It can be fixed, or wiped up, but there's too much hurt for a simple roll of paper towels to sop up. It's going to take some doing to steer this baby into calmer waters. She sings on," Honey," "This cannot happen again/Twice in a year is too much/Heavy are you on my mind/Twice in a flush, it ain't enough/Honey, while you were ashing in your coffee I was thinking 'bout telling you/What you've done to me/Honey, pretending like it never happened/Come over here and let me/Put you back together." It's here where her characters seem to get stuck. It's a place where maybe everyone's a little too forgiving and it leads to mistakes being repeated, with the damage more concentrated, kicking harder and more efficiently knocking the wind out of them.