Samia's "Bovine Excision" Lyrics Explained: The Wish to Be Untouchable Comes True

The narrator of Samia's "Bovine Excision" asks to be untouchable, and by the last line the song grants that wish in the worst way available: drained, bloodless, cold. Everything before the outro is someone building walls out of bath supplies, a Diet Dr Pepper and a Raymond Carver paperback, while people pound on the door. The only character who shows a better way to live is a stranger in a bar who gets exactly one line, said twice. Put plainly, the song is about wanting to stop feeling things, getting your way, and discovering that the opposite of touchable is closer to dead than to safe.

A tub, a soda, and a door that's gone

Verse 1 is funny before it's anything else. A Diet Dr Pepper and a Carver book make a bath kit for someone planning to stay a while. "Sitting in the bathtub while they're knocking" puts the narrator in the one room in the house that locks, ignoring whoever "they" are. Then comes "I wanna be untouchable," twice, the way a kid repeats a wish so it counts.

Verse 2 takes the lock away.

Whoever "you" is, they've decided the narrator doesn't get a hiding place. The doll eyes stare without blinking, red the way litmus paper goes red in acid. That's a sting with nowhere to look away.

This is the line everyone asks about, and it holds the whole contradiction. In the fairy tale, feeling a pea through a tower of mattresses proves you're a real princess. You pass the test by being too sensitive. So the narrator who wants to be untouchable admits, one verse later, to feeling everything. Then the question: can I eat it? Swallowing the pea makes the irritant part of you instead of something pressing on you from outside. And it comes with a request for permission. Untouchable people don't ask. Sung twice, it stops being a joke and starts sounding like a plea.

Leeches on clean cotton

"Picking leeches off white underwear" puts parasites on the cleanest thing in the drawer. The neck and back are where they cling, the spots you can't reach or see yourself. The wish upgrades accordingly: "I wanna be impossible." Untouchable meant nobody gets in. Impossible means nobody can figure you out or have you at all, which is the inscrutable stare turned into a life plan.

Verse 4: somebody else finally talks

Up to now, every line has been either "I wanna" or an image from inside the narrator's sealed-off world. Then, abruptly, Fred.

Fred is fishing. It's a guy hoping a shared memory will do the flirting for him. The song leaves the bathroom for a public room, and the relief is physical, like opening a window. Other people exist. They talk. They say slightly embarrassing things to each other in bars.

The line I keep coming back to is hers. It works as a brush-off and a boast in the same breath. She concedes the age and refuses the conclusion people draw from it, that she's off the board, past being flirted with, finished. Notice the grammar too. The narrator spends the whole song stating what they want to be. She's the only person who states what she is.

That contrast is the song's argument. Untouchable and impossible are both conditions of not being present: no contact, no access, no one reaching you. The woman at the bar claims the opposite. She's here, she's reachable, a little worn, and very much alive. You could hear her line as plain deflection, a tired woman swatting Fred away, and the lyric allows that. Even so, she's swatting him from inside her own life, which is more than the narrator has managed all song. (The song never confirms she's the bartender, either, but "she" answering a flirt aimed at the bartender is a pretty safe bet.)

Passing go, going nowhere

Verse 5 is the narrator out in the world, sort of. Rice wine and lime-flavored Lays are cheap and sour, gas-station comfort. "Passing go to sit in driveways" is a sharp joke: you collect your $200 and spend it parked outside a house, engine off, not going in.

But there's movement here, and some glamour. "Clad in leopard" is armor with a sense of humor. "Clutch the banister" means something solid to grip. "Twirling like a Degas dancer" calls up those painted ballerinas, mid-rehearsal, posed and watched. The narrator has taken a half-step toward the bartender's way of being alive, still holding on to the railing, still performing, but out of the tub.

The outro: wish granted

Then the tense changes. Every "I wanna" becomes "I just wanted to be your friend." Past tense, and much smaller. It's an absurdly mild summary for a story involving a removed door and leeches, and the mildness is the tell: the narrator shrinks the whole ordeal down to something polite enough to say out loud.

The tea is warm. The hand holding it isn't. Then "drained, drained bloodless," four times, and the repetition empties the phrase the way the narrator has been emptied. Here's the untouchable state, finally achieved. Nothing left to sting, nothing for leeches to take, no blood to go red in the litmus. The title names a cutting of cattle, yet no cow ever shows up. All that's left is the bloodlessness, a wound with the animal already gone. It's no accident the word also names the album.

Conclusion

The narrator spent the whole song asking to be beyond reach, and the outro hands it over: a cold hand, a drained body, a wish phrased in the past tense. Meanwhile, a woman in a bar, getting flirted with by a guy named Fred, said the only line in the song that sounds like a person who's okay. I think Samia builds the song around that trade on purpose, putting the bathtub and the barstool in the same four minutes so you can see which one is warmer. Being touchable is the price of being alive, and the song lets a stranger say it in six words: "I'm old but I'm not dead."

Lyric analysis powered by Scalpel.