22 Jul 2025 3 min read playlist

Road to Joy - Bright Eyes

I grew up in a conflicted Republican household. I “voted” for Bill Clinton in a mock election at my elementary school and intuited a transgression of the family norm. In 2004, my dad went to a rally with his friends from work and brought home a six-foot Bush/Cheney sign and stapled it over my bedroom window. For weeks, the light in my room came filtered through blue corrugated plastic. I thought it was awesome. What a grand, strange, delightful gesture this good man, our leader George Bush, has inspired in my father! Our weird neighbor Darrel called the fire department on halloween to complain. Typical whiny democrat.

At the same time, my mom was waging (and winning) a fierce campaign in support of a local school funding levy. She fought hard against a group called Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes. She believed communities had a duty to take care of their kids and that schools were worth investing in. But the COAST people say they're conservatives too - why aren't we agreeing on this? "Some people are just selfish on principle." I went to school board meetings with her. I could teach someone how to calculate a Mill. We marched in parades, put up yard signs; we were engaged in our community. It set a tremendous example that I often take for granted, and oriented me early to complex and procedural and personal systems of power.

On election night, a local reporter came to our house to talk with my mom as the results came in. I remember refreshing the results on the family computer in the living room/kitchen — someone asked how many electoral votes Ohio had and I knew the answer. "Twenty." I felt so proud of that. I knew what a bellweather was. The paper ran a photo of my mom, with just the top of my head visible in the corner of the frame. I was on the computer, reading the news. She was standing over me, smiling as she looked at the screen. It was my second time being in the paper. The first one was cute, middle school square dancing in gym class. This one was way cooler. It was about democracy.

I had an emerging identity? I knew about politics. I was a smart conservative teenager. I got full access to all the ugly insider jokes—racist, homophobic, misogynistic. I parroted Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage that I soaked in from the passenger seat of my dad’s Jeep Cherokee. I treasure these memories: lending a hand with an errand for the store, or coming home from marching band eating skyline. I'd like to somehow experience the smell of that Cherokee again, a small business owner potpourri of leather, cardboard, butcher shop, and clean.

Around 2006, things started to shift for me. I got into Bright Eyes. American Apparel. I sang in a hardcore band. Open patriotism was not so celebrated in some of these new cultural spaces that I was exploring. I needed a pivot. I still wanted to feel smart, still wanted to hold on to being correct, so I read Atlas Shrugged and found my way into the rhetorical hellhole of libertarianism. It let me mock everyone and act like I've never been wrong. It was the behavioral expression of my need to believe that I was right and my absolute faith in democracy. Men liked it when I talked about capitalism. I liked imagining myself rich. I didn’t really know other people were people yet.

This is a playlist I’ll be adding to over time. Each song comes with a journal entry of some kind—what that looks like might shift and morph as I go. I’m going to have fun with these. It’s a celebration of songs that make me feel all kinds of ways.