Cannons writes like someone dictating a fantasy while half-asleep.
What is Cannons's music about?
These eleven songs are about wanting to feel something so badly that you'll accept the feeling of wanting as a substitute for the thing itself. Someone dances alone and calls it liberation. Someone builds a wall and then begs someone else to demolish it. Someone describes love as physical collapse and calls it devotion. The scenarios change but the emotional stance never does: 'every speaker is passive, overwhelmed, waiting for someone else to make the next move.' It's gorgeous and empty in equal measure.
What themes does Cannons write about?
Magical thinking when nothing else works — Good Luck Charm is built entirely on incantation masquerading as love song. The speaker calls someone their charm while describing dreams slipping away and wishing on dead constellations. The charm demonstrably isn't working, but the more desperate things get, the harder they cling to repeating the phrase itself, like saying it enough times will make it true.
She's protecting the addiction by calling it weakness — 'Every time is the last time I play the fool' is someone who knows exactly what they're doing and needs to believe they don't. I Get Weak frames desire as something involuntary, but then the narrator admits to missing even the lies, which means the pull isn't some outside force. It's a choice she keeps making while pretending she has no control.
Wanting to be wanted more than wanting the person — This is Carousel's entire architecture. The narrator performs elaborate desire while claiming they didn't long for them at first, making the whole thing feel like an attempt to create reciprocal need rather than express genuine connection. Transmission into void disguised as romance. Fool for You does the same thing, all the certainty in the chorus and all the doubt everywhere else, asking for confirmation of reciprocal desire twice because the validation matters more than the relationship.
Grief as group activity so you don't feel it alone — Shine turns the neon lights that witnessed a burnout into the same lights where she'll now shine, but the obsessive repetition of the title reveals someone stuck in place, chanting survival instead of living it. The song addresses those who loved too much, trying to collectivize pain so it feels less like failure. What looks like moving on is actually a refusal to leave the scene of the crime.
The persona collapsing in real time — These Nights is about someone who built their identity around being unshakeable and watching it disintegrate. Every self-description gets immediately contradicted: smooth operator but lost in the dark, calm impersonator breaking down. The central question asks whether she's lost her thunder, but the song won't say what the thunder actually was or where it went. Just the mounting panic of someone realizing their performance no longer works.
What makes Cannons's writing unique?
What makes Cannons interesting isn't the beauty of the production or the dreaminess of the delivery. It's the gap between how overwhelmed these narrators claim to be and how little they actually do about it. Every song is someone describing feelings so intense they're physically collapsing while refusing to make a single choice that might change the situation. That's not a criticism. That's the whole point. These are songs about the exact moment before action, stretched into infinity, turned into an aesthetic. The refusal to move forward is the subject, not a failure of the writing.