If ‘Welcome to My Island’ is the insane overture, ‘Pretty in Possible’ finds me at street level, just daydreaming. I wanted to do something with as little structure as possible where you just enter a song vocally and just flow and there’s no discernible verses or choruses. It’s actually a surprisingly difficult memo to stick to because it’s so easy to get into these little patterns and want to bring them back. I managed to refuse the repetition of stuff—except for, of course, the opening vocals, which are a nod to Suzanne Vega, definitely. It’s my favourite song on the album, mostly because I got to be so free inside of it. It’s a very simple song, outside a beautiful string section inspired by Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy’. Those dark, dense strings give this song a sadness and depth that come out of nowhere. These orchestral swells at the end of songs became a compositional motif on the album.

— via Apple Music

My favorite song on the album is “Pretty in Possible.” It’s my favorite song on the album because it’s complete stream of consciousness there’s no verses, there’s no choruses, I just enter the song and flow [like a] sailboat that’s just surfing through these choppy seas. I wanted this song to feel almost the way it feels to walk down the street when you’re just spacing out, and different things that you see pass you by and kind of send you on different little thought tangents then you’re snapped into the next one.

— via Q with Tom Power

It came from a funny two-chord progression that Danny L Harle had made, going back and forth, with a little synth line that goes [sings] bum-bah-bum-bah. I always write melodically first, using a mash of vowels and consonants that feels right, and then pencil in lyrics often much later. But in the case of this song, I started to feel frustrated by structure and the need to work within a verse-and-chorus template. I had this idea to make a song where, once you enter it, nothing repeats. There are no sections, you just flow.
‘Pretty in Possible’ was one of the toughest lyrical songs on the album, because there’s so much attitude in the vocal portion. And it really wanted to resist narrative. I wanted to feel like not only was it not about anything, but that it feels the way spacing out feels, like when you’re looking out the window and daydreaming. Keep it constantly tumbling, ricocheting between being internal and external.

— via Pitchfork

In a feature for CRACK ahead of its release, Polachek referred to “Pretty In Possible” as the song she is “most proud of” on the album:

[It] was born from a “cool experiment where Danny and I were like, ‘OK, let’s write a song that has no verses or choruses – where you just enter the song and flow.’”

Pretty In Possible is my favorite song on Desire, and also the song that made me see the rest of the album clearly for the first time.
Early 2021, deep in a pocket of writing with Danny L Harle in London, I became suddenly allergic to “verses” and “choruses”, and wanted to try writing a vocal melody that just tumbled forward without repeating sections.

Danny showed me these melancholic chords he’d composed for an unused remix. I loved it—melancholic and playful and the same time, and it stood up to lots of repetition. And repetition was essential for getting lost inside the song without clear signposts. Same agenda as “Billions”, “Bunny [Is A RIder]” and “Smoke”: to sail over these hypnotic grooves in a way that feels good but is entirely unpredictable.

Then we built all the instrumental nuance around the vocal, to make these nonlinear scene changes just like the “Welcome To My Island” music video.

The lyrics also had to be anti-narrative, like meandering thoughts as you walk down the street, channel surfing between emotional and physical reality. But despite my best efforts, there’s still a thru-line lurking down there about Potential, and about it’s restless convection current that love stirs up, the kind that makes you late for everything, and makes it not matter.

—via Instagram