Okay, so I may have a Problem

Everyone is king when there’s no one left to pawn.

-Beat the Devil’s Tattoo

There are two entities I would like to blame for this problem, Spotify and the friend who introduced me to Spotify. In reality, my friend probably doesn’t even know of the problem she has enabled. But Spotify had to have known, when putting together its Southern Gothic playlist, that they were feeding some kind of habit.

This habit of mine is to listen to the Civil Wars, standing by the window, my grandma’s quilt wrapped around my shoulders, bathed in the morning light. I imagine I’m watching over my daddy’s drought-ravaged tobacco field, wondering if my beau survived the gunfight at the local bar. My trusty mutt lies at my feet, waiting for me to grab the family shotgun and wreak vigilantly justice on our remote, lawless town.

Except I’m in suburban Minnesota, have never fired a gun in my life, and own a Shih Tzu whose afraid of the vacuum cleaner. My parents are from small town Wisconsin, but even that town has a Walmart now.

Not that this isn’t my father’s fault. Instead of playing Radio Disney in the car like a normal parent of preschooler, he played old school country music for the entirety of my childhood. By the time I was eight, Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash was my favorite song. It's not quite the eerie, folky feeling of Southern Gothic music, but you can see how it led me here.

You can see how this would mess with a young girl’s psyche, to the point where she watches Winters Bone and thinks “That would be kinda cool.” Or to the point where I say “y’all” around my friends, when we all know I’m about as country as 1989 era Taylor Swift.

There’s no universal message that can be drawn from this obsession, except maybe that one shouldn’t let their impressionable daughter listen to Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow up to be Cowboys. That one should remind their daughter how lucky she is to watch True Detective in her perfectly lawful city? That Southern life is pretty much the same as Midwestern life except with different accents? I don’t know. Clearly I’m not distanced enough from this subject. I’m listening to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club while writing this.

Does this happen to anyone else? Is there a certain type of music that transforms your imaginative self into someone you could never be?