There’s something quietly devastating about Chalumeau ’s “My Hands Are Tied.” Not because it delivers emotional crescendos with stadium-level drama or spills its pain into easy, streaming-era confession. It does neither. Instead, this song moves like memory—unreliable, circuitous, unfinished. It withholds as much as it reveals, and that’s the point.
Written by Brown University professors Katherine Bergeron and Butch Rovan, who perform together as Chalumeau, the track is a late entry in a long-evolving musical conversation between the two. Originally written by Rovan years ago at a time of personal constraint, the song was reshaped as their creative and romantic partnership deepened. Bergeron revised the lyrics, Rovan reimagined the arrangement, and the result is a guitar-driven ballad that feels more like a reckoning than a lament.
What makes “My Hands Are Tied” work isn’t its lyrical clarity—it’s the opposite. The song resists tidy emotional narrative. “I know, it’s not supposed to hurt / It’s just love, and it’s not something you deserve,” Bergeron sings early on, her delivery restrained, betraying nothing. But then comes the chorus: “I’ll never reveal the way I feel inside,” she repeats, and it’s in that repetition—those subtle melodic lifts and falls—that the song confesses what its words won’t.
This tension between emotional containment and musical exposure runs through every layer of the track. Rovan’s arrangement builds slowly, from plaintive guitar riffs to a cresting solo that bursts forward after the final lyric, as if trying to articulate everything the narrator refuses to say. It’s a deliberate structural choice: the instruments carry the emotional load the lyrics suppress.
The accompanying video literalizes this disconnect. A woman boards a train, leaving behind a place that’s broken but still tethered to her. The color grading shifts between washed-out memory and harsh present reality, framing the past as both safer and more elusive than the future. It’s not a story of resolution, but of persistence—the kind of ache that travels with you, no matter how far you go.
While the song stands alone, it gains resonance when considered in the broader context of Blue, Chalumeau’s upcoming self-produced album. “My Hands Are Tied” falls in the final third of the ten-track project, sitting beside “Never Give Up” in what seems like the record’s emotional crater. The pair have spent the last eighteen months crafting this work independently—from composition to mixing—with the same kind of meticulous attention that defines this song.
It’s also worth noting the environment that birthed this project. Chalumeau may operate outside the traditional music industry infrastructure, but their academic backgrounds give them unusual tools. Their lyrics lean philosophical without being abstract; their production choices, like the evolving basslines and swelling solos, feel sculpted rather than spontaneous. Artists like Jenny Hval or The National come to mind—not because Chalumeau sounds like them, but because they similarly blur the line between intellectual inquiry and emotional storytelling.
Where many indie-pop bands might lean into stylized distance or lo-fi insincerity, Chalumeau instead honors the messy entanglements of adult relationships. They don’t offer resolution; they examine what it means to desire connection while choosing silence. In that way, “My Hands Are Tied” becomes a document not just of a relationship, but of a worldview—where vulnerability is risky, love is ambiguous, and the most honest truths are the ones you never say aloud.
And yet, even as the song ends in ambiguity, the guitar solo insists on feeling. It interrupts the quiet resolve of the final lyric, swelling upward like a secret finally spoken. That, more than anything, is where “My Hands Are Tied” lands: not in what is said, but in what escapes.