I often take things a bit too seriously — perhaps even this column.

To curate a cohesive look, I brought 10 identical white shirts and six identical black shirts to USC, and that’s all you will ever see me in.

Before the Daily Trojan had me switch to an online recording software, I recorded every single interview on the same audio recorder. I always wear jeans to reporting events, alongside polo shirts only for Undergraduate Student Government senate meetings.

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If you ask me about any of the 47 “Survivor” seasons or 40 mainline “The Challenge” seasons, I could almost surely name a majority of players, the winner(s) and list out a series of key moments thanks to my over eight hours of podcast listening a week. As Survivor 45’s Emily Flippen would say, this is “a nice way of saying I’m neurotic.”

Based on the fact this is a music column, and I haven’t started talking about music yet, I bet you’re guessing this is the part where I tell you music is an escape from the seriousness of my everyday life.

Well, you’re not entirely wrong. 

Music has always been one of the few things that can calm me down, yet, like everything else in my life, it often turns into another overly structured piece.

To create my “seasonal” playlists, which I have four of a year, an internalized algorithm decides which artists and songs will be represented. Pearl Jam always has one song, Waylon Jennings another; Journey earns two picks; Fleetwood Mac gets a representative and so on. Looking Glass’ “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” is in 16 of my playlists for an extreme example.

Even in the less-defined picks, everything is very similar. One song always reminds me of my grandma — this time Gladys Knight & The Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia.” About three songs always return from two seasons ago, and one song always returns from the previous season about halfway through its lifecycle.

Now, I love my music taste, and there’s a reason it doesn’t change very often, but I think you can imagine how this approach could get a bit stale. To be honest, I’m itching to create “Spring ‘25,” and it’s not even February.

Enter something I like to call my “unserious” genre. It’s not that I would consider these bad songs — otherwise, I wouldn’t listen to some tracks more than 200 times a year — but, to me, they symbolize something different from the norm.

I consider George Strait’s “I Can Still Make Cheyenne” to be my favorite song at the moment. Overall, it’s a song that fits within the image I have tried to create for myself: very mellow, respectable and a bit down but never uncontent. When a 12-year-old yodeler singing about his “Twang” comes on after, it gives me a pretty good laugh.

These songs highlight extreme parts of my personality and pull me away from the intentional mood and image I have created for myself through the rest of the playlist. Sometimes, it’s a good thing to have perspective.

Take my favorite example: “From Stanton Station” by Looking Glass. The song’s protagonist is a really depressing, pathetic man who, sadly, I can sometimes relate to — just a bit. Then I listen to the lyrics again, and I start laughing. Like, who do I really think I am? Let’s be so for real. I go to USC.

As out of character as it might seem, I am, without a doubt, the biggest Reba McEntire fan I know. In “The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia,” Reba tells an utterly ridiculous story about herself as a little sister who “don’t miss when she aims her gun” and kills both her older brother’s cheating wife and her lover, which eventually ends in her brother getting hung. While it sometimes feels like I can relate to a story, even one this preposterous, I promise I’m not a psychopath.

Maybe my parents get a little annoyed when a man who calls himself Meat Loaf sings a 12-minute ballad that ends in perhaps the cheesiest take-away ever concocted, uses probably the creepiest blood-centered song opening ever or says Coup de Ville and Cracker Jack in the same sentence, but sometimes ridiculousness is beauty. Chaos can be order.

While this is all absolutely true, I would argue that the metaphor means a little bit more. As a good friend from the Daily Trojan once told me, we should all “microdose fun.” The madness is the reason.

​“Jam Journal” is a rotating column featuring a new Daily Trojan editor in each installment commenting on the music most important to them. Sean Campbell is a news editor at the Daily Trojan.