The other night on my walk home, Role Model’s song, Compromise, shuffled on and I froze. When he sings, “Don’t you compromise, the sun will always rise,” it sounds like a resigned acceptance that he lost the one good thing in his life, and an apology at the same time. It hit different than when I first heard it. I didn’t just hear the words; I felt them, like the song had been sitting on ice until my life finally caught up. That’s the funny thing about music—we think we outgrow it, but most of the time it just grows into us.
Take Renee Rapp’s Sometimes. When she belts, “I’m tired of being a good time,” I don’t just understand it, I feel like she broke into my Notes app and stole my half-written texts. The chaos she describes makes sense to me now in ways it didn’t before. The same goes for Billie Eilish’s Halley’s Comet. When she sighs, “I don’t want it, and I don’t want to want you,” it’s not just a whispery ballad anymore; it’s the ache of wanting something that doesn’t make sense, sung so softly it almost feels like a secret. At seventeen, I thought it was pretty. At twenty-one, it’s devastating.
Lorde’s sophomore album Melodrama is still my blueprint for being young and dramatic, but certain songs grow teeth over time. The Louvre—with its offhand line, “Broadcast the boom, boom, boom, boom, and make ’em all dance to it”—once felt like playful nonsense. Now, it’s the way you make even the messiest heartbreak feel like a performance. Lorde knew back in 2017 what I’m just learning: you can be shattered and still be at centre stage.
Of course, Taylor Swift is the patron saint of re-growth. Right now, I’m stuck somewhere between the defiance of “I had a marvelous time ruining everything” from The Last Great American Dynasty and the urgency of of Speak Now, where she pleads, “You need to hear me out / And they said speak now”. Both remind me that reinvention isn’t always neat, that sometimes you lean into the chaos, and other times you just have to say the thing, even if your voice shakes. Taylor has always been the artist I circle back to, not out of nostalgia, but because her music evolves with me. Each era becomes a mirror, reflecting back the messiness of growing up and the courage to own it.
And then there are artists who soundtrack entire seasons of life. Noah Kahan basically owned my autumn last year. Stick Season is eternal, but his live album Live From Fenway Park adds something new: when thousands of voices scream, “So, pack up your car, put a hand on your heart / Say whatever you feel, be wherever you are…You’re gonna go far,” it doesn’t feel lonely anymore. Even his first album sneaks in, those early songs that sound like home when everything else feels foreign.
Other times, a lyric lingers because of its precision. On Free Now, from Gracie Abrams’ The Secret of Us, she sings, “Hope you find somewhere safe for your baggage.” It’s such a small, almost throwaway line, yet it clings like a ghost. The haunting comes from what sits underneath: the ache of wanting to be something with someone but knowing you can’t, because they’re not there yet. It’s the heartbreak of an “almost,” the right person at the wrong time. You should feel empty, but you don’t, you still love them, just from a distance. And that’s a kind of growth too. You’re not hinging your whole life on fixing someone else; you’re learning to let the almost remain an almost. That tension—the love that doesn’t get to exist, but still exists in you—is what makes the lyric cut so deeply.
So, do we actually outgrow music? I don’t think so. Sometimes we outgrow versions of ourselves that once loved a song. Sometimes a lyric lies dormant until we’re old enough, or heartbroken enough, to finally understand it. Music doesn’t leave us behind. It waits; sometimes patiently, sometimes hauntingly, until we’re ready to meet it again.
That’s why when Role Model sang about not being in Kansas anymore, it suddenly felt like my heart was on display. My playlist is a diary I didn’t mean to keep, a reminder that music grows with me even when I swore I’d outgrown it.
Anyway… I’m gonna go listen to the new Favors album, because Ashe and FINNEAS is something I didn’t know I wanted, but now, definitely need.