Welcome back to The House That Trauma Built.
If “The Thing” was about the moment I internalized the blame—deciding that I was the problem—then “Spoilt” is the story of where that belief was cemented. It is the story of the external rejection that confirmed my worst internal fears.
I called this track a “Tribute to my Father,” but like the word “spoilt” itself, the title is heavy with irony. A tribute is usually an act of honor. This is an act of exorcism.
Table Of Contents
The Tuesday Morning Abandonment
The song opens with a memory that is burned into the retinas of my history. It’s a scene so mundane it becomes horrifying:
“School gates on a Tuesday morning / A final word without a warning / ‘You can’t go back,’ is all you said / Left those words to haunt my head.”
There is something particularly cruel about the banality of a Tuesday. It wasn’t a dramatic midnight escape; it was the start of a school day. The devastation was delivered with a casual finality.
“I didn’t know a child could be returned / A lesson that my young heart learned.”
This line is the core wound of the “looked after” experience for so many of us. We are not just left; we are returned. Like a defective product. Like a purchase that didn’t live up to the advertisement. When a parent tells you “you can’t go back,” they aren’t just closing a door on a house; they are closing the door on your identity as their child.
The System Steps In
In the second verse, I wanted to contrast the fight of my mother against the flight of my father.
“My mother fought for years on end / A broken home she tried to mend / You couldn’t even last a year / You chose your partner, made it clear.”
While my mother was fighting a war she couldn’t win against the system, my father made a choice. He chose a partner over his son. And the machinery of the state began to turn immediately.
“But the placement search had already begun / Two new homes beneath the sun / Part of the system, just a file / Didn’t see my own smile for a while.”
This connects directly to the themes we will explore later in “A Case File and a Heartbeat.” The transition from “son” to “file” happens instantly. The “placement search” is a clinical term for a heartbreaking reality: looking for strangers to do the job your parents couldn’t.
Reclaiming the Word “Spoilt”
The bridge and the final verse contain the most visceral moment of the track, and the reason for the song’s title. It references a specific memory, a final phone call where I tried to sever ties, and the venom that was spat back at me.
“With a voice so sharp and blunt / You called me a ‘spoilt little cunt.'”
That word—spoilt—echoed in my head for years. It implies entitlement. It implies that I had been given too much. But in the outro, I flip the narrative. I take the word back and strip it of his definition, applying the real definition. To “spoil” something is to ruin it, to damage it, to rot it from the inside.
“Well, the only thing you ever spoilt / Was a child’s heart, worked and toiled / With seeds of trauma, deep and smart / Yeah, you spoilt me with a broken heart.”
I wasn’t a spoiled child in the way he meant. I was a spoiled child in the way fruit is spoiled by neglect. I was damaged by the very person charged with protecting me.
The Cycle of Sunshine and Acid Rain
The bridge also touches on a theme that haunts the rest of the album: the genesis of addiction.
“You’d laugh at the addictions you helped create / Assault my hope with words of hate / And throw me out all over again / A cycle of sunshine and acid rain.”
We will see this seed grow into the weeds of “A Medicated Mess” and “The Woods.” The trauma inflicted here didn’t just stay in the past; it manifested as “seeds of trauma, deep and smart,” growing into the coping mechanisms I used to numb the pain of that rejection.
Stepping Out From the Cloud
Despite the anger, the song ends on a note of recovery. It has to. To stay in the anger is to let him win.
“But the silence now is getting loud / I’m stepping out from under your cloud / Without your chaos, I’m recovering / A different story I’m discovering.”
The “cloud” is the shadow of his rejection. Stepping out from under it means realizing that his inability to be a father was a failure of his character, not a failure of my worth.
“Spoilt” is a heavy track. It’s the sound of a door slamming shut. But in that silence, I eventually found the space to start building my own house.
Until next time, keep listening.
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