"Fig Tree" by Rozzi // Song Review

- September 20, 2026

Rozzi's "Fig Tree" has such a warm, soulful sound that beautifully taps into the intimacy of the lyrics and the personal metamorphosis she was experiencing. She wrote this song, and the rest of the corresponding albums she named it after, when she turned 30. It was inspired by the many ways she felt like she was entering new stages of life both personally and within the relationships around her.

"You know I used to be someone else, though I'm not sure who, but she goes farther away, the closer I get to you," she sings in the chorus. The song captures the very distinct shifting sense of self that comes with growing older and allowing yourself to change.

The title was inspired by the famous passage from Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, in which the novel's protagonist, Esther, is confronted with every possible future set before her, each one symbolized by a fig hanging on a fig tree. While she spends so much time wondering which fig to choose, they all begin to wither and die, leaving her with nothing. The fear of choosing one path over all the others, and of being overcome by the pressures of wasted time and potential, is at the forefront of the novel and is also beautifully reinterpreted in Rozzi's work. It's a metaphor every woman can relate to at some point in her life, especially at the cusp of major life moments and transitions.

It speaks to the complexity of what it means to choose one path over another, especially as an artist wanting to take a more untraditional route than most, and the fear of missing out on the one that wasn't chosen. It largely reflects both the personal internal and wider societal external pressures that women especially face as we grow older and are expected to have everything figured out. For the novel that was first published in 1963 and Rozzi's version of it in 2025, it just shows the continued relevance of this weight and universal anxieties that women have always, and will always, carry through generations. "To choose a life is to delete the rest." is what Rozzi described the feeling as in her essay with Bustle.

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig-tree in the story.

From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and off-beat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.

I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig-tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

-Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

"The book was paperback but this page was made of lead. It was a closed fist ramming into my gut. I felt overwhelmed by the endless options stretching out around me, and the incredible limitations that came from choosing just one. Despite the beauty of my life - a new, healthy relationship, supportive friendships, and a career I adored - my stress lingered. Like most great art, this book came into my life when I needed it." Rozzi added in her Bustle essay.

The final sentences in particular really encapsulate the feeling that this song, the original fig tree passage written decades ago, and what Rozzi's project as a whole represents. "I was different than I had been the year before. And who I had been before was different than who I was the year before that. Maybe in that way we get more than one fig. With my eggs somewhere in Redondo Beach, I keep on becoming."

The closing notes of the song itself are equally powerful and moving in the way they capture the emotional weight of choosing a path, but also ultimately realizing that one never fully finishes growing or changing in life. Despite any path that's chosen, we remain multifaceted beings who are always evolving.

"One fig on the branch, yeah, we're choosing each other, but the love of my life is the loss of another, and that's something to grieve, though there's no better lover than you," she sings in the striking final verse. "And if it ends, like everything's ended before, will I be the same?"