Dick caught me at the counter this morning, holding up the Japanese pressing of "Bluebird" from the DJ Vadim album. "One Self," he said, not looking up. "DJ Format produced the album, but Vadim's all over this track. 2003. You can hear the difference." He was right. He's always right about the pressings. I nodded like I knew, which I did, but I'd forgotten, which is different.
I bring this up because I found this playlist—RENT FREE—and the title is doing exactly what it says. I've been running to it for a week and I can't stop thinking about the name. Rent free. Like something's living in your head without permission, without paying its way, just... there. Taking up space you didn't agree to give it.
The Nude Party's "Somebody Tryin' to Hoodoo Me" comes in second, all swampy paranoia and garage-rock strut, and here's the thing: somebody IS trying to hoodoo me. It's me. I'm the one doing it to myself. Every failed relationship I keep replaying, every conversation I rewrote in my head three days too late, every moment I chose the record over the person standing in front of me asking me to just be present for five goddamn minutes.
Laura used to say I lived in my head more than I lived with her. She wasn't wrong. The playlist goes from Dan Auerbach's "Heartbroken, In Disrepair"—which sounds exactly like the title, just this beautiful broken-down blues thing—into "Bluebird," and that transition is the whole problem. From heartbreak to this soaring trip-hop moment where Yarah Bravo's singing about flying away, and I'm supposed to feel hopeful but instead I'm thinking about how I always choose flight. Not fight-or-flight. Just flight.
By the time the Misfits' "American Nightmare" kicks in at track seven—the 1981 session, which Dick would remind me is rawer than the later versions—I'm running harder than the BPM suggests I should. The tempo doesn't change much across this playlist. It hovers around that steady mid-tempo pocket. But the intensity shifts. Psychobilly to power pop to alternative hip hop, and it never lets you settle into what you think it is.
That's the revelation I didn't want: I'm the same way. I shift genres without warning. I'll be fine, present, almost boyfriend-material, and then someone says the wrong thing about the Replacements or asks me what I'm feeling, and I'm gone. I'm in my head cataloging every reissue and why the original mix was better, because facts are safer than admitting I don't know how to stay.
The playlist ends with "Pink Skies (Demo)" by Wiley from Atlanta, and demos always feel like unfinished business. Like you meant to complete something but ran out of time or courage or both. I've got a whole life of demos. Relationships I never finished. Conversations I never had. Apologies I never made because I was too busy being right about the pressing.
Somebody's trying to hoodoo me. The playlist knows it. Dick knows it. I'm starting to suspect everyone knows it but me.
