The doorbell rings and the electrician stands there in Carhartt overalls, a toolbelt slung around the waist, a smile as big as a cracked watermelon on a slightly pudgy face; the pudge a recent acquisition, not quite yet grown into, but still worn comfortably.  The electrician was beautiful once, in the way that all youth is beautiful. But the aged face standing in the door tells a universal tale: beauty fades. The long hair, once a deep and thick chestnut-brown is now gray-streaked. The eyes, though they still sparkle, are not quite as bright. And the wrinkles appearing on the face tell of a life that hasn’t always been easy.  Fat Electrician’s brief wants to tell the story of the end: a Texan a long way from home, whose rodeo days and carefree life are long forgotten, now filled with house calls, and appointments in the service of others. But it fails—spectacularly. Beauty doesn’t fade, it metamorphoses. And the woman standing on the doorstep waiting to install your light fixture seems to know this instinctively. The sparkle in her eye, from her smile, is like a secret only she knows.   

Fat Electrician opens with a very controlled mix of spice, sweet hay, and something green and sweet: nothing quite vibrant, like a citrus or bergamot, but something subdued, always threatening to explode into something wild. Vetiver. It’s there from beginning to end. The young cowgirl, wild at heart, chasing dreams not boys, sweaty in the Texas heat, climbing trees, fishing, barrel racing and always knowing something more was out there. She loves the smell of Texas earth, sweet hay and the smoky atmosphere of a rodeo. And she is as unpredictable as a summer breeze moving through a field of wheat. She was born into this, but it’s not necessarily where she belongs, and she knows it. But she always makes the best of what’s around her. It’s like she’s waiting for her moment, patiently, like a soft, sweet vanilla base.  She doesn’t have dreams, she has goals, and a plan to achieve them.

And yet, her plan to leave is not because small-town life is dull or unfulfilling.  She simply knows that there is more, and she wants it. As the vetiver dries down, it dries out, allowing room for the cedar to recall childhood memories. A time before she decided to follow her heart. A time when growing up meant becoming a lady, and becoming a lady meant soft, feminine, and matronly things: a mother’s cedar chest, an heirloom, full of soft comforters and crafted blankets. It meant caring for living things: the cedar shavings of a pet’s terrarium, something small, furry, alive. In this sense, Fat Electrician is wonderfully textured.  The smells are things and places, like heirlooms and home; the textures are animalic and warm, like small furry creatures, soft fabrics and even a little sweat. The cowgirl doesn’t want to listen, wants to run from this life, but the black pepper Orpur and cedarwood in the top and heart prevent the vetiver from completely running away with the composition; a vetiver made somewhat heavier and sweeter by elemi resin, holding it back. So, she does listen, because she is young and doesn’t yet understand. The cedarwood and black pepper restrain the vetiver, for now.

With maturity comes ever more responsibility in the decisions she makes.  As the vetiver matures and cools, freshly mowed, wet hay turns to smoke and spice, and the first hints of vanilla emerge. A moment of choice.  Just as smoke rises heavenward and represents freedom from earthly bounds, the cowgirl realizes that she too can rise above what everyone thinks she ought to be. What if freedom is a choice? A choice to be free of social constraints of place and time. Doesn’t such a choice require guidance? It turns out that the opoponax and vanilla have been there all along, gently nudging the composition toward something more, more distant, sweeter and spicier than the country grasses of Texas, aided by the smoky myrrh that wants the vetiver to rise above the ground, into the storied skyline of a big city. So, off to the city she goes. A deliberate choice.

Nobody leaves everything they’ve ever known without a moment of grief. As she chooses a new kind of wild, she grieves for the loss of what was. Then leaves despite that grief. But the remedy is there in the bridge from the heart to the base. A note in the dry down that initially smells of ginger. No. Myrrh.  Myrrh bridges the gap between the old and the new. Memories of what was do not have to be painful, and myrrh’s medicinal note, while not completely eliminating the grief, does make the decision easier. The myrrh allows her to understand that she is not leaving the wild Texas grasses behind; she is taking them with, and they will always be a part of her.

In fact, even as the vanilla matures and emerges, the vetiver never quite disappears in the dry down. There is a constant push and pull between it and the vanilla. In one moment, it’s all vanilla; in another, it’s more vetiver. But the truth is, the wild grass remains through it all.  Many compositions with vanilla or tonka in the base tend to end there, on that note, and become quieter through the last of the dry down.  But Fat Electrician maintains the tension between the wild and the cultivated. It may be hard to see the wild cowgirl in the electrician standing on the porch, but it doesn’t mean she’s not there.

The brief for Fat Electrician tells the story of a once beautiful cowboy who is “Now, a Fat Electrician in New Jersey, talent depleted in his sexual decline.” The brief failed spectacularly, and in the best way. More remarkable, perhaps, in that it failed from the inside — because what Antoine Maisondieu actually composed tells a different story entirely. The vetiver never surrenders to the vanilla. The wild grass never disappears. The tension between the two is not decline, it’s coexistence — the cowgirl and the electrician occupying the same skin simultaneously, neither erasing the other. De Swardt wanted a story that told about the end of something, a eulogy. Maisondieu, perhaps without intending to, composed a life. The fat electrician on the doorstep whose “more to love” derives not from loss but from abundance — from joy, from family, from the laughter that made those lines on her face. The brief, as delivered by DeSwardt, suggests there is something degrading about working in the service of others, that beauty is the highest form of capital, and that fat and beautiful cannot occupy the same body. But the cowgirl chose the trade. She’s comfortable in the pudge because she earned it. And the secret in her eye — that quiet sparkle — is the knowledge that the brief never understood her at all.