Who’s the Devil on Your Back?

I wake up with music already stuck in my head most days. I don’t know if it’s a good habit, but my habit is to use that music to give my day definition. It’s a marker at the beginning. It sets a tone for the morning, and morning sets a tone for the rest of the day.

Today’s song was “Devil on My Back” by Mark Stoney.

It’s a thumpy, grumpy march of a song, heavy on the attitude and light on the complexity.

But that’s fine, because it strikes an evocative tone. Not all songs need to be the kind you can analyze for years without divining their deepest purpose. Some songs can embody a mood and be enough.

It’s strange to wake up with songs already stuck in my head. There’s almost always logic to them. Sometimes the logic’s as simple as I listened to the song a lot recently, or last yesterday.

Sometimes, I’m convinced that my psyche finds songs in the same way that it conjures dreams.

See, a leading theory about dreams is that they are our subconscious minds working through problems that we need to work through…