I Tried to Run Away When I Was 6 is like the ghost of an argument as it runs through your head; their music swells with everything you wish you’d said. The humble, personal and raw thoughts of Domenica Pilleggi form the bedroom-pop ballads of I Tried to Run Away When I Was 6. Pileggi began writing for their project in February of 2014. After being diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder, Pileggi recalls, “I couldn’t work or go to school so I stayed up one night and wrote all of the songs that are on my self-titled. I played music pretty casually throughout my life but it was the first time I made it for myself.” Since then, Pileggi has released numerous albums on Bandcamp including it’s so nice, a self-titled EP, and split releases with Adult Mom, Boosegumps and Cyberbully Mom Club.
Pileggi crafts an album that runs the range of human emotion without setting into one lane. Endlessly intriguing, Pileggi’s latest release may(be), released in May 2015, expresses love both shunned and requited. Pileggi encompasses the spectrum of emotion: each track on “May(be) is unique, but the album maintains a cohesive unity through a running vulnerability and reflective lyrical observation. Both lyrically and in their quick-yet-carefully-considered delivery, Pileggi recalls the singer-songwriter vibe of Kimya Dawson: raw, minimal, yet emotionally fierce. On the track “just how I feel” Pileggi embraces a fragile, gutsy honesty full of a tranquil reflectiveness. “chips for dinner”’s lyrics follow a stream-of-consciousness progression of stray thoughts, shifting swiftly from the universal to the personal. In “barefoot”, Pileggi captures the mundane, humorous, and darker corners of everyday life—“Ran out of Sugar again, so I drink my coffee black / ran out of morality again but I know you’ll have my back. / Everyone wants to ask about our haircuts / I just want to walk around with you barefoot.” This reflectiveness, along with a constant state of wonder, make may(be) so personal, and at the same time so relatable. may(be) is a inventive production, almost a sculptural work, that fills a genre completely of Pileggi’s own.
