Artist by VIOLET LOVE is a haunting and self-reflective song that captures the emotional depth and honesty at the core of her upcoming EP *Destined to Fail*. The lyrics explore pain, self-doubt, and the search for meaning with striking clarity, offering a deeply human reflection on what it means to live with emotional wounds while still striving to understand one’s place in the world. Throughout the song, VIOLET LOVE uses personal reflection as both a weapon and a mirror, confronting her own fears and failures in a way that feels raw, real, and unfiltered.

At its core, the song is one of fatigue—the kind that doesn’t just derive from physical conflict, but also that of the burden of carrying too many questions without solace. VIOLET LOVE opens by acknowledging her hurt outright, without recourse to metaphor. This directness sets the tone for the whole piece. She outlines how people in her life, even those she previously trusted, now remind her of things she’d rather forget. That feeling doesn’t derive purely from bitterness; it derives from a sense of being stuck in patterns of attachment and betrayal. Love, that traditionally redemptive force, here becomes something that entangles instead of liberates. It interferes with her own ambitions and aspirations, demonstrating how even the loveliest emotions can become obstacles when one is struggling back towards mastery over one’s own existence.

VIOLET LOVE then transitions to an epiphany that salvation can’t come from a force other than one’s self. The instant she realizes that “no one comes to save me” isn’t a word of defeat but of awakening. It’s a recognition of the bitter truth that meaning and cure need to originate from a place within. In that recognition, there’s loneliness as much as empowerment. The message is that she’s passed the place where she’s waiting for help to arrive and is now prepared to do something in response, perhaps embracing darker emotions such as a need for revenge. Here, however, her motive for revenge isn’t that she wishes to hurt people—the prescription pills and a world trying to keep itself afloat by artifice are a commentary on society’s tendency to anesthetize itself against hurt rather than experience it. Her rebellion here is an act of honesty, a need to show the world the cost of avoidance.

The latter section of the song heightens her internal conflict. The symbolism of a maze captures the sense of befuddlement and circularity so common to emotional injury. The fact that pain concludes the maze highlights how sometimes a search for closure ends up causing more suffering. VIOLET LOVE invokes a fear that she will become something that she doesn’t wish to be, suggesting that part of her recovery involves dismissing identities that were established by hurt or expectation. This self-awareness resonates especially powerfully—she’s not just answering hurt but challenging her very identity in its wake.

When she wonders whether it’s honest to admit her dissatisfaction, VIOLET LOVE exposes the constant tension between truth and denial. She questions what’s real, what’s constant, and what has only been repeated out of habit. The idea of life “on repeat” paints a picture of stagnation, but the song itself becomes the act of breaking that cycle. Through expression, she finds a kind of movement forward, even if it’s painful.

The repetition of the opening lines towards the end of the song ties the song together emotionally. It shows that though her emotions have not disappeared, her sense of them has shifted. By the time she asks what her purpose is, the tone no longer rings so strongly as despair but instead as curiosity. She knows life and death as the only promises given, but she also takes agency by saying that fate and destiny are “up to the artist.” That sentence recontextualizes the entire song—it’s not just a song about suffering but a song about artistry. VIOLET LOVE takes agency over her suffering and turns it into something lovely. 

The final image of the painting “doused in red and green” ties back to the song’s title, “Artist.” The red and green colors evoke both beauty and decay, temptation and truth. The apple becomes a symbol of human contradiction—the sweetness and the poison, the desire to know and the fear of what that knowledge brings. By ending with the idea that pain multiplies and meets you again, VIOLET LOVE doesn’t claim to have escaped suffering. Instead, she accepts that it’s part of existence, something that follows and shapes us. “Artist” stands out as an unflinching yet beautiful expression of self-awareness, turning vulnerability into strength through its lyrical honesty.