Incredibly Specific Playlist #3: Kohl's Dressing Room Energy

Vanessa Carlton. John Mayer. Regina Spektor. Nothing's too pedestrian to be nostalgic.

Friday’s Greetings, friends-on-a-screen! I hope you’re reading this email instead of doing your job right now. Reading emails feels like a classic doing-your-job move. So you can sort of still feel like you’re working while you read what the inside of my brain sounds like!

And I mean that this month more than ever. The inside of my brain sounds like the inside of a Kohl’s. New Balances squelching across linoleum. Moms telling their 12-year-old daughters they should really try those jeans on in the next size up. And soft 2000s pop that feels like an unwashed beige sweater.

If I were to look at a Spotify Wrapped- style data breakdown of every type of location I’ve spent time in for the last 20 years, the Kohl’s department store franchise would make the top 10. (Somewhere below “house” and “school” but a few notches above “swimming pool locker room.”) A more refined aesthetic than Sears. A more robust rewards program than JC Penney. A more reasonable price point than Macy’s. It’s an ideal place for a thirtysomething Midwestern mom— not a Karen or a Linda, but maybe a Tracy or a Jen— to nourish and replenish her spirit before she returns to the outside world.

Like my Midwestern mom, thirtysomething through my formative years. My mom, like the moms in cartoony greeting cards and poorly-designed Facebook memes, loved to shop. She had a short, blonde haircut that she used a round brush to frame her face and a special gel to tousle up in the back. Her favorite colors to wear were (and are) blue, gray, black, and beige. She owns the same Calvin Klein dress in three of those four colors. She wears fitted v-necks with sports team logos and denim skirts with Naturalizer sandals. She was Kohl’s.

When my mom took my sister and I to Kohl’s, we looked for deals. Markdowns in red pen. Yellow clearance stickers. Any questionable fashion choice I desired was within reach if it came at a bargain. I made it a game to sell my mom on whatever ill-fitting, viciously color-blocked thing I wanted, if it made me happy and the price was right. Houndstooth dress pants. Earrings that looked like leaves. Business-casual blouses with a cheap pearl-looking necklace built in. A black and white Nike tankini with a skirt— in October!!

Now as an adult, I sometimes get a weird sort of insecurity that my upbringing wasn’t interesting enough. It was bare bones middle-class Midwestern consumerist monoculture. Backyard swingsets and Happy Meal toys. Disney Princess Halloween costumes and as-seen-on-TV craft kits. Any time I hear a friend talk about a childhood filled with activity and intrigue— cruise vacations to Mexico, learning to ice skate or Irish dance, camping in an RV with parents who didn’t have cable even though they totally could have— I ache for their busy, quirky nostalgia. I envision my friends as children, dirtying their hands and getting good at euchre, while at the same time I’m hiding in a rack of polo shirts while Michelle Branch echoes off the walls. I feel too sanitized, too sheltered, a little cheated.

When I ask my mom why she never put me in ballet class or Girl Scouts or karate, she tells me I was never interested. I guess I seemed content enough making my little sister laugh while we wandered through the men’s t-shirts, talking about what happened at school that day in the checkout line, and singing along to the radio in the car on the way to the mall and back. And in a world where the internet’s access to endless options invites endless comparisons to lives that aren’t mine, I wish I could access a little more of that contentment now.

I didn’t hear all of the songs on this playlist inside the physical walls of a Kohl’s while I sat on the floor next to my mother’s blackberry-colored turtle-shell patterned purse. Some are more recent, but hearken back to a time when a life well-lived seemed so buyable, so ownable, so simple to throw in a gray plastic bag and call it a day. Don’t you think the early 2000s was so far away? Lorde asks on last year’s “Mood Ring.” And maybe it is. But maybe not too far away.

HERE’S THE PLAYLIST: “Kohl’s Dressing Room Energy”

LISTEN TO THIS PLAYLIST WHILE YOU:

• Clean your house on a Saturday afternoon with something that smells like lemon.

• Drive with the windows down alongside a friend while you talk about the strangers you have nicknames for.

• Answer the memes your mom sends you on Facebook Messenger with a different heart emoji than usual.

THE MOST “THIS PLAYLIST” SONG ON THIS PLAYLIST: 

Nothing feels more like letting your fingers drift over a throw pillow, then a scented candle, then a 38DD bra with no underwire than hearing Ingrid Michaelson’s “The Way I Am.” It’s— and I mean this only with kindness— the most brunette song I’ve ever heard.

THIS DOESN’T LOOK LIKE IT BELONGS HERE BUT I PROMISE IT DOES: 

Sure, maybe songs by the likes of queer indie darlings Snail Mail and Adult Mom might not be pumped through the system by team lead Christy at 1 pm in Dearborn, Michigan. But something in the softness, the vocal chirp, the light casual delivery over guitar jangles, distinctly conjures the ethos of a pink buttonless half-sweater or a purple men’s dress shirt.

THE TRUE STAR OF THIS PLAYLIST:

There. Is. So. Much. Maroon. 5. On. This. Playlist. Before Adam Levine was tattooed and shirtless on the Super Bowl before he judged singers we’ve never heard of on television, he unintentionally out- Colbie Callait-ed Colbie Callait. And that is DIFFICULT. She wore off-white knitted goddamn skullcaps and rhymed “toes” with “nose.” But to hear early Maroon 5 is to feel your best in a sensible pair of light-wash jeans on Easter Sunday.

MY PERSONAL FAVORITE SONG ON THIS PLAYLIST: 

Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” is the. Motherfuckin. Blueprint. Today’s TikTok indie pop girlies wish they could write this song. It’s comfort. It’s pain. It’s abstract. It’s carnal. It’s… somehow both incredibly sexy and pouty AND (if I can pretend to have synesthesia for a second) camel-colored. Did you know Natalie Imbruglia is Australian? Did you know this song was probably written in a studio with a bunch of producers and didn’t just magically spring up from a fountain at the center of a mall in Ohio? You didn’t. You never asked. You weren’t paying attention, because you were swept completely away wherever you heard it: at the dentist’s office, at the public pool, in the back of your friend’s mom’s SUV coming home from a Twilight movie. Wherever you were, it made you romanticize your Midwestern middle-class 2000s existence a little bit. And we need to do that sometimes.

I hope you enjoy bumping these soft, breathable, moisture-wicking bops. If you really want to call your mom now, I’ve done my job.