Best Behavior by Cyrena Wages
Cyrena is back with a new single about... well, it's about a lot.
I have been on my best behavior since the last day of April 2025, when I first played this tune, dying for you to hear it. It’s the closest song yet of Cyrena’s recent releases to being light and boppy. It has a groove. Is that disco? You feel something, you want to move around. Even if you cannot dance. Just don’t listen too closely to the words.
Cyrena has said that her 2026 album, Miss Melancholia, reckons with the South’s “Bible Belt beauty pageant” expectations. This song, Best Behavior, is the most direct version of that and is more on the nose than its predecessors from last year, If It Ain’t Broke and Find Out.
The beauty pageant concept, and Cyrena’s own experiences of it, were also covered in Vanity Project, her incredible 2024 debut album. On the cover of that album we find a melancholy Cyrena in swimming costume, wearing a sash that simply reads “Vanity Project”. She is kneeling in the mud and dirt on the bank of the Mississippi river at twilight. It feels deeply lonely. Did she win?
Cross your legs and bat your eyes
Daddy worked hard to pay for that smile
She’s so pretty, we all hate her
Better be on your best behavior
This song is not as sad as those songs. I hear it as a satire on the beauty pageant, which lets us relax a bit. Satire is surely the best way to cover difficult topics. Cyrena describes a young girl being told what to do. Cross your legs, bat your eyes. Do this, do that… and you might win. The whole idea of the competition is to fit in but the winner is the one who stands out just a little, in only the right ways.
All of the girls are being puppeted by parents or well-meaning relatives and friends. There is puppetry in last year’s Find Out too. But Best Behavior references the American obsession with perfect teeth. How old do you need to be to have all your teeth replaced with fake ones? We don’t do that in England. Teeth are for eating with. Or moaning about when they rot. We don’t do the beauty pageant either, but we did get a bit too excited about Miss World in the 1970s.
Every word of a Cyrena Wages lyric performs. She’s so pretty… well, we have to admit that. At least with all that paint on the face, the garish lipstick, perhaps anyone would look pretty. How old is she? She looks 25. She’s only twelve, perhaps fourteen. I can’t listen to this song without the name JonBenét Ramsey coming to mind. The whole idea makes me shudder. Anyway, the bit about being pretty wasn’t a compliment, it was just the set-up to a new insult.
In her song Paper Rings, Taylor Swift talks about “shiny things” and the superficiality of so much of life. It is a song Cyrena referenced in a recent interview with the Vibes. The shinier the thing, the more jealous some people will feel. Is anyone shinier than Taylor at the moment? How quick were her critics to pan her new album?
Remember when it was so simple?
Good girls don’t die young
I’m still back there on the playground
With your poison tongue
I didn’t know I wasn’t beautiful
Until you told me so
How can Christianity align with the teenage beauty pageant in any way? So many contradictions, so many things that do not make sense. I look across at Tennessee with a sense of awe and fear. It’s such an amazing place but when did the idea of the bible belt stop becoming something positive and become something darker? I don’t feel qualified to get into it, but it puzzles the British.
In my scientific worldview none of this makes sense; none of it fits into a logical whole. Cyrena is in a very good position to help us navigate these ideas, as a former pageant participant. Twenty years later she is still navigating the consequences. Writers say that everything is material, do it for the plot. The worst days are the ones you write about. Dare we ask: would she rather it had not happened at all?
Don’t listen too closely to the words. Not every time. The words are what keeps this song grounded, keeps it meaningful, helps us to understand our world. But the tune! The tune is really fun. If you imagine the tune as an instrumental 12” single it is nothing but light. I’m thinking of that Carried Away remix again.
It is interesting to look back to April, a time when all I knew of Cyrena were the ten songs of Vanity Project. Those songs were a very accurate guide to the real Cyrena. If you listen carefully to them, you can find humour in them, she’s all there. There isn’t really any need for more exposition. The humour this year is in the front. In this song particularly the humour is more biting, more cynical: satire.
Strung out princesses in cages
Starving to be seen
While pin-stripe posers
Post their wages
It’s so fucking cheap
Don’t worry. Cyrena isn’t in that dark place any more but without those times, these times would have sounded very different. As a fan, and from a distance, I think those times helped her to grow. She no longer finds it difficult to be vulnerable in public, and an artist needs that more than anything else.
And that is the final analysis: they were difficult times, but the character in this song won in the end, she triumphed over it all. She survived and blossomed and so can you. Is this the same woman who murders her husband in If It Ain’t Broke?
The anger is tempered by a few more years on the clock. I’ve learned that Cyrena’s music is not as simple as you might want it to be: the person in her songs is not her, not completely, not always. She sometimes calls this persona C$. But whatever difficult memories she carries, Cyrena Wages is a well-rounded, deeply insightful artist. She was born already a 20-something adult with a couple of previous lives already lived, and I feel like we can all learn something from her experiences.
This time around, the message is: it gets better, you can find a way, your way. The video, linked below, reveals even more nuance. Listen today!
You can stream Cyrena’s music in all the usual places and find out more on her website. Her first album, set in Memphis, was Vanity Project. You can also catch CW live with the wonderful Lilly Winwood at Dee’s Lounge next week on January 15!
Find Out by Cyrena Wages
Find Out is slower and has more of a swing than that brilliant first single, If It Ain't Broke, which has been out almost a month now. And what a hectic first week that was. I have not been that closely involved with a record release before and the pace of it, the excitement, the thrill of the chase, was addictive. I had dopamine running down the walls …
PD- Brilliant mind who helps me understand my own wee brain and heart - thank you thank you for this kind and funny review! “Is this the woman who murdered her husband”… coffee spat out of mouth.