Soap&Skin lyric, “Me and the Devil walking side by side” (The Cost)

When Soap&Skin delivers the chilling line, “Me and the Devil walking side by side,” the effect is immediate and haunting. 

The lyric is simple on the surface, but it carries a tremendous emotional and symbolic weight that stretches back to the deep roots of old blues traditions.

The cost here is not measured in money, fame, or fleeting pleasures. It is the price of a life lived in defiance of morality, the weight of choices that align more with destruction than redemption. 

It is the emotional, spiritual, and even existential debt that accumulates when one consistently chooses darkness over light. That is the cost she bears—her soul, her peace, and ultimately, her eternal destiny.

The style of Soap&Skin may feel very different from the dusty, raw blues of the Mississippi Delta, yet the structure and intent of the song are a deliberate callback to that tradition. 

In many of those early blues numbers, the devil was never just a metaphor—it was a constant shadow, a figure representing temptation, punishment, or inevitability. Soap&Skin revives that lineage, wrapping it in a minimalist yet eerie soundscape that feels both modern and ancient at the same time.

At its core, the song tells the story of a person who acknowledges a life filled with questionable or outright destructive choices. 

The narrator is not begging for forgiveness, nor is she pretending to be innocent. Instead, there is a mixture of resignation and defiance as she accepts that her path has already tied her fate to the devil’s. 

Hell, in this framing, is not a punishment that frightens her. Rather, it feels like the natural consequence of a long companionship—she and the devil are already side by side, old partners who have walked together for years.

The line also highlights the unnerving idea that evil is not always forced upon someone by an external demon. Sometimes, it is embraced willingly. 

The song suggests she was not merely “possessed” in the traditional sense, as if some spirit hijacked her actions. 

Instead, she consciously chose to carry out acts of vengeance, cruelty, or rebellion. The devil did not trick her—she did the work herself, knowingly, even eagerly. 

This is what makes the lyric so heavy: the implication that the cost of her choices was exacted not in a single moment, but across an entire life.

What makes Soap&Skin stand out here is the way she blends theatrical minimalism with raw, unsettling storytelling. 

The band may be stripped down in terms of arrangement, but that leaves space for the listener to sit uncomfortably with the words, to feel their depth. 

The sparseness is intentional—it pushes the lyric forward and forces the listener to wrestle with its meaning.

For someone hearing Soap&Skin for the first time, the music might come across as odd, stark, or even too bleak. Yet the brilliance lies in how directly it confronts its subject matter. 

There’s no attempt to soften or dress it up. Instead, we are invited into a world where the cost of a life lived in darkness is not avoided, hidden, or denied—it is embraced fully, and perhaps even proudly.

In the end, “Me and the Devil walking side by side” is more than just a lyric. It is a chilling confession, a recognition of partnership with destruction, and an acknowledgment that the price of one’s actions must eventually be paid. 

That is the cost—the surrender of one’s soul to the very darkness that was once courted so willingly.