One of girl in red’s breakthrough hits was “We Fell In Love In October,” a wistful indie-pop love song built on simple drums, echo-laden guitars, and elegant orchestral strings — sort of like Vivian Girls with a chamber-pop twist. Ever since its release in 2018, the song has always picked up streams in the fall, like a micro-scale version of “All I Want For Christmas Is You” rising back to #1 on the Hot 100 every December. Today, girl in red has released a sequel.
The standalone single “October Passed Me By” pushes further into that autumnal sonic palette. It was produced remotely by the National’s Aaron Dessner, who helped Taylor Swift achieve a similar aesthetic on folklore and evermore. The lyrics are somewhat Swiftian as well: “Yeah, I got bitter when you got cold/ Could you really blame me though?/ You know this song is about you/ Who else could it be?/ You were the first to make me/ Feel like I was me/ You’re just a memory.”
Marie Ulven, the girl in red herself, shared this statement about the song:
ctober Passed Me By has been living in the back of my head since June 2021. Every fall since I put out we fell in love in October in 2018, I was encouraged to do things on social media to talk about the song again. Making TikToks, Instagram posts and other things about a song I made years ago never felt honest. I’m not in the same place as I was when I wrote the song, emotionally or artistically, so pretending to be so felt boring and uninteresting. So, I never did any of that; but last year something happened in my personal love life that brought up a lot of feelings that I had to confront internally.
I met Aaron Dessner in the fall of 2021. I told him I had this song that I had written and wanted to make but I hadn’t started recording it yet. I had never worked with him, so for me it felt like an interesting and also lowkey thing to try out. I finished writing the song in Oslo and LA, working remotely with Aaron and with my great friend Matias Tellez on mix.
October Passed Me By is where I’m at today, emotionally and musically. Grateful for what has been, and full of love for a very special person that made a huge impact on me as a person. And also, I thought it was way cooler to expand the we fell in love in October universe artistically, rather than making some uninspired videos that will disappear into the black hole of content that is TikTok.
PS: I will probably make TikToks too. lol.
“October Passed Me By” premiered today along with a short film directed by Gustav Johansson, starring Lisa Loven Kongsli and Ruth Vega Fernandes as older versions of the characters from the “We Fell In Love In October” video. Watch that below, or just check out the audio if you want to hear the song without actors talking over it.
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