MARISSA BURR
Opinion Editor
It seems like for the first eighteen years of our lives, we can’t wait to grow up.
All we can think about is how long until we can drive, go to college, earn our own money and live in our own apartments.
Yet, once the time actually comes for us to be dropped off by our parents outside the dorms, room filled to the brim with everything we need for living on our own, we feel woefully unprepared for the life ahead of us.
In teen movies, the end of our teens and early twenties seems like such an amazing time—and it can be, don’t get me wrong—but what these cheesy flicks fail to highlight are all the messed up moments in between.
Luckily, what’s gotten me through the past three years has been listening to my favorite artists write songs about those real, down-and-dirty moments that honestly define the college experience.
“Hot Mess” by Zoe Clark
This is one of the most relatable songs I have come across in the past few years.
The chorus sums up the life of being a struggling girl attempting to put makeup on in the car on the way to college just to look a little less like a zombie.
Clark’s “If I’m a mess might as well be a hot one” is the catchphrase I always have running through my head in the morning.
This song became a staple on my playlist that I’d bop to on my twenty minute drive to therapy once a week, and this is also something she mentions multiple times in her song.
I wholeheartedly support openly talking about mental health issues as well as going to counseling to help with them, and for any other reason. The more it is normalized, the less of a stigma it will have.
That might be why I love the lyrics “I’m a blessed one, stressed one, a little bit depressed one” that all comes back around to “I swear to God I’m alright.”
Making light of my daily struggles with anxiety and depression is almost as common as eating breakfast. Remarkably, Clark also covers the contradiction in a lot of college student’s lives that is our “bank account begging [us] to treat her better” yet we’re also constantly spending our money on coffee, takeout and other not-so-healthy substances.
Overall, this song’s relatability matches its catchiness and makes it a great song to have on any playlist.
“Numb Little Bug” by Em Beihold
I found this song around the same time as the former, which made for another great addition to the songs I played on my way to therapy.
The brutal honesty in all of these songs prepared me to be more open in my sessions.
Beihold comes right out of the gate with this brash and candid attitude when she says, “I don’t feel a single thing, have the pills done too much?”
Anyone who has ever been on mood stabilizers, antidepressants, anxiety medication and other things prescribed to help with daily functions that our brains don’t otherwise allow for, knows the feeling of bottoming-out of a medicine.
I know I do, and so the second I heard that line I was captivated. This only continued with the seemingly simple chorus line of “you’re hanging by a thread but you’ve gotta survive, cause you’ve gotta survive.” It’s essentially circular reasoning, but it is so relatable.
She even explains what she really means earlier in the chorus by saying “do you ever get a little bit tired of life, like you’re not really happy but you don’t want to die.”
I can confidently say this is something that myself and my friends have felt many times. When the stresses of school, work and just life in general weigh down, it’s hard to be happy or find a reason to keep going, but you know you have to.
So many songs memorialize that moment when you’ve made it over the hump of every struggle you’ve faced, but sometimes you just need to hear one about the trenches you waded through.
This is definitely one of those songs.
“She’s So Overrated” by Madilyn Bailey
Originally sung on America’s Got Talent, Bailey’s lyrics for this song are a compilation of hate comments on her Youtube page.
With this in mind, it is easier to understand some of the off-hand phrases said including “ear murder” and “if it doesn’t work out you could always try porn.”
Now obviously, if this song is on the list, you can assume she isn’t nearly as bad as these commenters made her out to be.
This song is the perfect example of the negative energy that we as a social media generation face every day.
For every positive comment our friends or family make, there are probably ten people who look at our post and think it’s ridiculous—and of course there are the people out there who feel the need to voice this unwanted opinion.
It’s impossible to filter every piece of hate from our profiles, despite each blocking and unfollowing feature, and it shouldn’t be up to us to walk away from something that makes us happy just because someone else chooses to be negative.
That would be like asking Katy Perry to get off the stage at a concert and not tour anymore because a fan started yelling obscenities at her.
The change needs to be on the person with malicious intent.
By having the chorus end with “sorry I just unsubscribed” because this is what people would comment when they hated her, as if this would be something that would really hurt Madilyn Bailey–yet it’s contributing to making her platform a more positive place. She makes these really nasty words into an upbeat and jammable tune that ended up gaining her more fans–that’s justice.
“Alone” by Nico Collins
I have had this song in my Spotify repertoire since I got the app back in 2019 and it was my typical “teenage angst” song that I would blast through my speakers and contemplate everything that was happening in my life.
An amazing lyrical story that reads similar to many of Eminem’s songs, “Alone” speaks to anybody who is at a point in their life where they’re trying to find themself and come into their own.
This song describes the pressures that teenagers and young adults face every day, with the most powerful lyric “he does all that he should, why is he misunderstood?”
With the second verse, we see the character growing from this kid who hated going to school where he didn’t learn anything and playing sports just to make his father happy into a teenager who gets into trouble trying to numb the pain that swirls in his head.
It’s at this point he comes to the realization that he is in control of his own life and that “don’t you know nobody will ever understand, the person that you are learn to hold your own hand.” He knows he is on his own in life and needs to find his own way.
By the bridge he’s 21–which is about where all of us are right now–and he’s questioning whether he made the right choices, and if this is where he’s meant to be.
Things aren’t perfect, and his problems haven’t gone away, but he’s still going to keep going because that’s how he’s made it through.
None of us have had a perfect life that has been without obstacles, but it’s how we deal with them and emerge from the ashes that makes us who we are.
“Quarter Life Crisis” by Taylor Bickett
The title of this playlist was almost the same as this song, so it’s only right that this is the finale.
I discovered this song on TikTok when it was the background sound to a trend about growing up too fast—I haven’t stopped listening to it since.
Every word in Bickett’s masterpiece cuts me and lifts me up all at the same time and that is what makes a great song. Starting with the first verse, the writer in me relates so much to “say that I read for fun, but haven’t read in months” because I also go through dry spells like that with both reading and writing; life just gets in the way sometimes.
Moving onto the second verse, “I’m constantly symptomatic, Mom says it’s psychosomatic” is the story of my life. My anxiety has always manifested itself into sickness and ailments as a way to avoid dealing with stressful situations. It’s taken me years to get over, and some days I still fail.
Which makes her next lyrics, “where’s all the talent that I had last decade, another gifted kid that burned out in the tenth grade” hit even harder.
Once my anxiety started manifesting in high school, I became less able to focus on the things I was naturally good at and instead was only dwelling on my pitfalls. I have discussed this at length with my friends and we all feel that burnout.
The bridge is unbelievably powerful, and will only become more relatable as the years continue. Bickett talks about how people she went to high school with are getting married and having families, while others are dead.
The way that so many people who were once on the same track are in hundreds of different points right now is hard to grapple with.
Even as a college student, we never know the stages of life that our peers are at, and it’s almost impossible not to compare. She says, “it feels like I’m falling behind,” and that hits home for me.
After taking a year off, I’m seeing people graduate and start their careers while I’m still finishing up gen-ed courses and going to orientation.
Starting over as a transfer has made me feel as though I’m in crisis and not where I’m supposed to be, but here’s the truth: There’s no “place” where you need to be. If it feels right and works for you, then everything will turn out alright.
For a full list of the songs that inspired the series “A Playlist for Every Mood” like @gummymnb’s playlist of the same name on Spotify or scan the QR code.