I'm pretty sure in another life I was a teenage girl, but not for the reasons you are probably thinking (I'll get to that in a bit). I have a feeling if I was, I probably wasn't anywhere near as talented or popular as each of my nieces are. All four of them are pretty much the best. Now my oldest niece (pictured above) has a daughter of her own, and I can't help but wonder what her life is going to be like as she grows up in this new world.
The things kids these days deal with are pretty crazy. I'm not going to say they are worse than what we grew up with in the 80's, but I feel like the emotions are much bigger than they were back then. Plus yes, some of the issues in general are also much different.
If you have been following me for a while, you know that I work in a public school district. Students got the day off today. They are calling for temps with windchill in the -20 F range, which is pretty dang cold. Since we are a public school, funding from the state is pretty sad, so we have a number of buildings that struggle to stay heated even on normal days. Nevermind when the polar vortex comes strolling through.
There's a good chance we will be closed tomorrow as well.
But anyway, like many districts, we have things in place to help ensure the mental and emotional well being of our students. Some might call it spying, it's really not as intrusive as that. I call it monitoring. We own the device and the account after all. In fact, we have been lucky enough to get ahead of a couple of situations that may have ended much worse thanks to this monitoring.
Most of the stuff is just kids being kids, but then there are other times when you just have to scratch your head at the stuff you see. The things these kids say to each other I never would have thought to say to another student back in the day. It's honestly beyond perverse.
But again, I digress. If you hadn't noticed, it's Tuesday. That means this post is going to be a #threetunetuesday post sponsored by @ablaze. Due to a series of events which I will get to in a second, my theme this week is "teenage angst".
So let's get to it!
Again, if you have been following me for a while, this is going to be a really familiar scenario for you. I was driving to work the other day with @mrsbozz and we had John Mayer's Sirius/XM station on called Life with John Mayer. While many of the songs on the station are his, he also plays songs from artists he enjoys, or songs that really move him.
It was right as I was pulling into the parking lot at work that he played the song "Messy" by Lola Young. I was immediately drawn in to the song, not just because John Mayer said he liked it, but this song is an absolute banger. It starts out really slow, kind of with a "Every Breath You Take" vibe with that driving bass line, but then it moves into that angsty kind of teen sound that I like.
As I said above, I think I must have been an angsty teen in a different life. I actually can't remember being angsty in this life. It's not like I was laying around listening to The Smith's all day or anything like that.
Given the fact that I like other artists like Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and Sabrina Carpenter, it doesn't shock me too much that I was so drawn to Lola Young. I took a deep dive into her music and I actually discovered that she has been around for a bit, but after her first album she was just releasing singles here and there until her more recent album called This Wasn't Meant For You Anyway.
In case you couldn't figure it out from her voice, Lola hails from Beckenham South London. Though born in 2001, she got started with her music career in 2013 participating in open mic competitions in the UK (thanks Wikipedia).
It wasn't until 2018 that she had her first breakthrough in the music business with that first album I mentioned above. It appears part of the reason for the big gap between 2018 and 2024 had to do with Covid. Shocker there right?
Either way, Lola has easily made it to my list of following artists and I look forward to seeing what else she comes out with in the future.
Speaking of teenage angst, if you like Lana Del Rey who I mentioned above, you should really take some time to dive into Suki Waterhouse. "Gateway Drug" is just one example of the many great songs she has. I actually discovered Suki from my Spotify playlists. I was listening to either Lana or Taylor and when that album finished, it started playing various other stuff for me.
Suki just happened to be one of those songs.
Waterhouse was born in Hammersmith London (apparently I have a thing for English girls), and her career actually started with modeling and acting. She's been in a quite a few movies including the Divergent series which many of you may know.
There is a good chance you may have already heard her song "Good Looking" as it became pretty popular in 2017.
While neither of the ladies I covered above are currently teenagers, their music resonates pretty deeply with them. I've reached out to one of my other nieces recently and we had a long talk about both Suki and Lola. Who they remind us of, what we like, what we don't. Stuff like that.
Anyway, if you feel like exploring your moody teenage years, you might want to check some of these artists out.
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