Okay so I did the "TikTok chooses the song" filter. You've seen it everywhere, the one that spins through songs until it lands on yours and allegedly reveals something about your soul or your vibe or your current emotional state. I went in expecting it to give me something I could laugh about. Probably a random pop song from 2008 or something genre-adjacent to everything I actively hate.
It did not do that. It landed on a song that was uncomfortably, almost inconveniently, exactly right. Not in a "haha this is my anthem" kind of way. In a "the algorithm knows something I haven't admitted out loud yet" kind of way. And I want to talk about that, because the experience sent me down a rabbit hole about taste and randomness and why we have such a complicated relationship with songs that tell the truth about us.
I'm not going to tell you which song it was, because then this becomes about the song and not about the experience. You know how that is. Protect your sacred things.
The Song Filter as Accidental Tarot
Here's what I think is actually happening with the song filter, psychologically. It's not mystical. The filter is random, it's literally just spinning through a library and landing on something, there's no AI profiling you based on your face structure. But here's the thing about randomness when you're watching it with emotional investment: you interpret it. The human brain is a meaning-making machine. Give it anything, clouds, tea leaves, a shuffled deck of cards, a random song choice, and it will find the pattern that feels true.
The song filter is accidental tarot not because it tells your fortune but because the interpretation process forces you to examine what you're already feeling. If it lands on a song about grief and you feel a recognition, that's not the algorithm reading you. That's you, reading yourself through a random external prompt. The filter is just the card. You're doing the reading.
I've loved this about music my whole life, actually. It's why I make it. A song is a little consciousness-portal. When you hear the right song at the right moment, the recognition isn't just "this sounds good." It's "this describes something I couldn't describe myself, and now I'm described, and now I feel less alone in it." That's the whole mechanism. That's why I was up at 2am for years making HEATHEN HYMNS. Because I knew what I needed to hear when I was losing my faith and scared and angry and grieving, and those songs didn't exist yet, so I had to make them.
What Randomness Teaches About Taste
But let me get back to the filter, because there's something genuinely interesting here about randomness and taste. When the song the filter chose felt RIGHT, when I had that full-body "oh, that's me" reaction, it told me something about what I actually love versus what I think I'm supposed to love or what fits my "brand."
I will be honest with you: I have a certain aesthetic that I inhabit publicly. Indie rock. Alt. Grunge influences. Tattoos and dive bars and honest anger and all of that is genuinely me. But I also have a very large and embarrassing range of music that I listen to in private that doesn't fit the aesthetic box I live in professionally. Some of it is deeply uncool. Some of it is things you would absolutely not expect from me if you only know me as "the woman who writes songs about losing her faith." idk, I love what I love and it does not always make sense.
The filter landing on something true, something outside the expected aesthetic, was a small reminder that taste is not a brand. Taste is actually what you love when nobody is watching and you're not curating. And there's a version of caring too much about your aesthetic that becomes a cage. You stop letting yourself love things that don't fit, you curate your listening into a coherent narrative, and you lose something in the process. The accidental discovery, the thing that comes from left field and rattles you. The filter, weirdly, gave me that.
The Songs That Tell the Truth About Us
I want to talk about this honestly, which means talking about music as a specific kind of truth-telling. Not all music is trying to be true in this way. Some of it is just supposed to be fun, catchy, a good time, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But some music is built to do the harder thing: to describe an interior experience so precisely that the person hearing it feels seen rather than just entertained.
That's what I was trying to do with HEATHEN HYMNS. The songs are mine. They come from my specific life, my specific loss, my specific reconstruction of self after losing a faith I held completely. But the letters and messages I've been getting since the record came out tell me that specificity translates. The more exactly true something is to one person's experience, the more it resonates with other people who had different but parallel experiences. That's not an accident. That's how emotional truth works.
The song filter tripped me up because randomness led to truth. But that's just what happens when you lower your guard. Something slips through the curation and it hits the nerve and you're standing there in your kitchen feeling called out by an algorithm that doesn't know you and isn't even trying to.
I love that. I want more of that. I've been thinking about how to build more randomness into my creative process, the forced-juxtaposition, the surprising input, because the guard I put up around my "sound" and my "aesthetic" can, over time, start to limit rather than protect.
What the Reaction Taught Me
When the filter landed on its song, I sat with it for a while before I posted. I was going to post the reaction immediately, that's the format, right, the immediate face reaction, and then I didn't. I sat in the moment instead.
The song was about a specific kind of longing that I have been carrying but haven't fully written about yet. The feeling of missing something that wasn't even yours. A version of a life you saw from the outside and wanted, or a version of yourself you almost became. Counterfactual grief. Not mourning what you had. Mourning what you almost had. The road not taken but also not completely untaken, just closed off before you got to see where it went.
I'm not going to get more specific than that right now because I think it's going into something new I'm starting to sketch out. But the filter cracked it open. A random song, a spinning wheel, a thirty-second video format, and underneath it, something real that I had been circling without looking at directly.
That's the thing about letting randomness in. You can control your inputs so carefully that nothing surprising ever reaches you. That's not safety. That's stasis. The best thing that can happen to a songwriter is to be ambushed by something true when you weren't looking for it.
So yeah, I let TikTok choose my song. It read me to filth. I am grateful.
What song do you think the filter would give you? Don't answer strategically. Answer honestly. That's the whole exercise.
a note on what this has to do with making music
I've been asked in a few interviews since HEATHEN HYMNS came out: where do you get your ideas? And the honest answer is that I don't know, exactly, because the good ones don't come from deliberate searching. They come from the sideways approach. A dream. A conversation that goes somewhere unexpected. A filter that spins and lands on something too true. The accidental input, the left-field arrival.
Every song on the record started as something small and lateral. A verse in the Bible I couldn't get out of my head. A phrase someone said to me in passing that kept surfacing at 3am. A chord change I played by accident while trying to play something else. The intentional pursuit of "write a song about X" has never produced my best work. The best work comes from the thing that arrives uninvited and won't leave.
The filter is a low-stakes version of that process. It creates a random input and your emotional response to it is data, data about what you're carrying around, what you're trying not to think about, what's been waiting for your attention. I'm going to keep using it. I'm going to use it deliberately as a writing prompt, not just as a TikTok bit. Give yourself a random song and then write about why it landed. See what shows up.
TikTok accidentally gave me a gift and I'm not above saying so. The algorithm does not know me. I know me. But sometimes the question being asked from the outside, even a random, algorithmic, dice-roll of a question, is the thing that unlocks the answer you were already holding.
What song do you think the filter would give you? Don't answer strategically. Answer honestly. That's the whole exercise.