“Cinema Hearts frontwoman Caroline Weinroth was a theater major in college, and when it came time to name her band’s second album, she looked to the world of musical theater for inspiration. Burned and Burnished is a riff on a line from The Fantasticks, the world’s longest-running musical. In that show, two fathers fake a feud so that their children will fall in love. They plot a mock abduction, hoping that the boy will save the girl and end up together, which they do, by the end of Act I. But in between acts, as the fathers and their children are frozen in a happy tableau, the narrator explains, “For the story is not ended/ and the play is never done/ Until we’ve all of us been burned a bit/ And burnished by—the sun!” Their happiness doesn’t last, of course: when the ruse is revealed, the couple breaks up and spends the second act learning about heartache and the harsh realities of the real world.”
Postcultural 