If you’ve always wondered about how to get a threesome together, whether or not you should date a Harvard grad, and if people who like music that is deeply challenging to the point of being unpleasant to listen to are worth dating, this episode with podcaster and author Amanda Montell offers some insights. It’s also spicy af with lots of frank talk about sex, hookups, and CBD gummies. We also got her to talk about cults and music, because hell yes cults use music to groom people.
Links:
Get copies of Amanda Montell’s books, Cultish and Word Slut. And listen to her podcast, Sounds Like a Cult — although it’s a lot less spicy than this conversation. Or maybe just a different kind of spicy.
That piece Courtney mentions in the pod about cult leaders who use music for mind control.
Melissa recommends a podcast on cults and wrote about Charles Manson getting a girlfriend (!!!!).
If, for some reason, that bit about CBD gummies caught your ear, here are some Amanda recommends.
Show Highlights:
00:36: The long and unabridged story of how Harvard/Hopkins ruined this great bop for Amanda
09:35: How to use a hookup app to find a threesome
18:16: When a breakup is shitty and it straight up ruins a song for you
19:06: Why makeout playlists don’t work
25:31: Nice guy, but…
29:13: Cults, cults, cults
Transcript:
Melissa: Hey, Melissa here. Just warning that this conversation with author and Sounds Like a Cult podcaster Amanda Montell includes some frank talk about sex. If you’re listening with your kids, be prepared to have your own frank talk about sex afterwards.
Melissa: Hello and welcome to Songs My Ex Ruined, where we talk about songs that have been ruined by exes. I’m Melissa Locker.
Courtney: And I’m Courtney E. Smith.
Melissa: We don’t tend to have many formalities around here. We tend to cut right to the chase and say, Amanda Montell, what song did an ex ruin for you?
Amanda Montell: The song is called “Bedroom,” by a band that is called Litany. Oh my God, I so, I know what I’m talking about, I promise. They’re London based, Yorkshire born. They’re like cutie, a little bit electronic, maybe a little bit twee, in my opinion, pop music. There are actually two exes involved in the elevation and then descent of this song.
Melissa: Wow, this is getting intriguing. I love this.
Amanda Montell: Let me describe the origin story. I was introduced to this song via — ex is generous. I went on maybe five dates with this person. We were never like in an exclusive relationship and we were never going to be.
Melissa: Many of our stories involve very loose definitions of exes.
Amanda Montell: Great, great. And I find that people define ex loosely in general, like depending on the weight that they give or, like, the context of the story. I don’t want to like necessarily dignify some of the people I’ve dated as exes, but for the purposes of this podcast and the title of it, we’ll just go ahead and call them exes.
Courtney: That might be the most vicious thing anyone has said so far on this podcast, and I love it.
Amanda Montell: Cool. So I, in 2018, found myself a single adult for the first time in my life. I was considering choosing a different song and a different ex for this story, but it felt a little too dark because when I was a senior in high school, I started dating who I would define as a predator. Someone who is like 11 years older than me and ruined “Your Love Is My Drug” by Kesha, but it’s just not what we’re talking about today.
Courtney: There are just so many people that have ruined all Kesha songs. Dr. Luke.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, yeah, totally. So many predators. Anyway, in 2018, that person and I finally broke up. This was after seven years of imprisonment, emotionally, physically. I’m fine. I found myself single for the first time in my life at the age of 25, and I was very excited. I shot into my new single life like a freaking cannon ball, as Miley Cyrus might say — icon. None of her songs have been ruined by anyone. Oh, well, “Wrecking Ball,” you know, “Wrecking Ball,” a little bit ruined. Yeah, I sang….
Courtney: Oh no!
Amanda Montell: Yeah, I sang karaoke crying with that terrible ex.
Courtney: That’s so brutal.
Melissa: Crying karaoke is the best karaoke.
Amanda Montell: I’m having a great time. I’m on apps for the first time. I’m on so many apps. I’m on Bumble, I’m on Hinge, I’m on Feeld. I’m around and it’s beautiful. It’s experimental. It’s an adventure. It’s everything I’m meant to be at this age. And one of the people that I dated that year, I met on Hinge, was this 24-year-old Irish data scientist from Dublin. He was a cutie. He was small, in stature. I like that. I’m 5’1″, okay. So, like I like a short king because to me they’re still a tall king.
Courtney: So relatable, so relatable.
Melissa: I know, yeah. I’m like, oh wait, how tall are we? So I’m 5’2″ and a half.
Amanda Montell: Love that for us.
Courtney: I’m 5’4″, but I don’t think I’m 5’4″ anymore.
Amanda Montell: You’re like Amazonian. Oh, I see. I’m definitely shrinking. Yeah, I’m shrinking. The more talkative I get, the smaller my stature becomes. It’s just a zero sum game out here. Okay, so I am going on a few dates with this Irish boy. It’s like there’s no drama whatsoever. He’s a cutie. I love his accent, accents are a huge deal maker or deal breaker for me.
Melissa: I mean for everyone. Come on, let’s be real. I have a voicemail from an Irish actor saved on my phone, and he’s literally talking about the death of his dog.
Amanda Montell: But it’s hot.
Melissa: But I can’t delete it cause it’s still hot.
Amanda Montell: Yeah…
Melissa: I’m just like…
Amanda Montell: It’s so hot. I fucking love an Irish accent. Okay, so I’m on this accent train. I’m like very casually dating this Irish boy. He and I have a lot of music taste in common. He introduces me to the song “Bedroom” by Litany. Super, super cute song. It’s just like cute as fuck. Having a great time swapping music with him. He really makes this song for me. He doesn’t have anything to do with it being ruined. Then I start dating someone very, very different from him and very different from my quote unquote type, or like the qualities I’m typically attracted to in general. I then started dating someone who felt like a challenge for me to crack. He was like this very serious, stern, like kind of self-important, dramatic writer with a thick beard.
Melissa: Why do girls love challenges so much?
Amanda Montell: Dude…
Melissa: Why do we love so challenges? I’m like, can’t we ever take it easy?
Amanda Montell: Well, now thank God, spoiler alert, I’m taking it much easier and I’m very happy. And yeah, I’ve been dating for a very long time, someone that I’ve known since middle school when we did community theater together, but it took a long time to rest.
Courtney: That’s really cute, I love that.
Melissa: Happy ending.
Amanda Montell: Totally., Yeah. For anyone who’s afraid of tension, the ending is good. Um, but okay, so I like also found this very serious person on Hinge. He went to, uh, college called Harvard. I don’t know if you are familiar with that school. Um…
Courtney: I’ve never heard of that. That’s fascinating.
Melissa: Is that the one that’s in Boston? The one… it’s in Boston, I think maybe?
Amanda Montell: Yeah, yeah. That’s what they say, that’s what they say. They say, “I went to school in Boston.” It’s like this weird cult like euphemism. So I was like, cool. I’ve never dated someone so pretentious before. That sounds like a fun little like deviation, plot twist. And, so he and I start dating and it’s kind of fun. He has like daddy energy, but not in a predator way — in an age appropriate way. He was maybe five years older than me and he was a writer and I was like, oh, this is kind of romantic. I was really like narrativizing the whole thing. I was like, he can be the Dunne to my Didion. Well, vomit sound.
Melissa: Wow, wow.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, yeah, I’m so sorry. Cut that out. No, I’m kidding. You can leave it, but…
Melissa: Oh, we’re leaving it.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, no, I’m so sorry. I was really trying to figure out like, what’s my plot? What is my plot? Spoiler alert. It’s bad to think of life that way.
Courtney: Yeah.
Amanda Montell: But I was like, what is my plot? What is my soundtrack? This dude, he, his, ugh… His whole personality and his whole music tastes, actually, every element of his persona, was like very strategically curated. It was actually kind of hard to tell who this person was other than like a beardy, serious human who went to Harvard.
Melissa: Quick question: how often did he mention that he went to Harvard?
Courtney: Legit question.
Amanda Montell: He didn’t have to mention it verbally that much because like his whole life was Harvard, like all his roommates were Harvard.
Melissa: Did he have the Harvard tie?
Courtney: Yeah, did he wear Harvard gear?
Melissa: Did he take you to the Harvard Club for a date?
Amanda Montell: Okay, so no, but he, it was insidious because he was somehow like so fucking Harvard, but very cooley emitted this disdain of that.
Melissa: Oh, self-hating Harvard-er. Nice.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, yeah.
Courtney: A WASP.
Amanda Montell: It’s, yeah, he went but, okay but he was like, but he grew up Jewish. And we actually grew up in the same hometown, but he went to private school. He was like nexus of a bunch of different like contradictions and so it was hard to be like, you’re fully problematic because he was just really good at like twisting his own narrative. He was a good curator of a persona, I’ll say that. Oh my God, I’m really dragging him.
Courtney: This sounds like a scam, like honestly.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, no, it was pretty scammy. It was pretty scammy. Anywho, we were dating for a little bit and then I think we were both kind of in like a somewhat experimental, maybe even transactional, phase of our dating lives. I think we were both like trying people on.
Melissa: He was dating people who didn’t go to Harvard.
Amanda Montell: Yeah.
Melissa: Edgy, edgy.
Amanda Montell: So edgy. Oh my God, yeah. He was very much like that opening scene in The Social Network, when like Mark Zuckerberg’s character or whatever is like, “You go to BU.” Yeah, cause I went to NYU. It was that energy, where it’s like I went to the shittier school, but okay. So we’re like now in a phase of like very early on in our dating, where we’re talking about our sexual fantasies and kind of our sexual goals. Like what do we want to accomplish? And who do we wanna accomplish? And it came out that like we both want to have threesomes, and we’d never had them before. So we were like, great. Like we love a social adventure, we love a social challenge. Let’s try to like take this across the finish line and see if we can like secure a threesome.
Courtney: Yeah.
Amanda Montell: So I take it upon myself to, to find threesome partners for us. And I really turn it into quite, quite the pastime. I find that I really thrive. I really have a lot of fun doing this. I, it’s just so fun. I mean like…
Melissa: So how much of a research project was this? Was this like dating people or was this like going on Craigslist? Was this doing like deep dives on LinkedIn? Like how were you…
Courtney: Or just like, Tinder account? What was it?
Amanda Montell: I was on Feeld, which is like an app literally for this. Feeld, formally known as Thrinder. It’s an app for people who are looking for some kind of de deviation from like the… But it’s actually a very honest app because like there, there are a lot of people obviously on Tinder and Bumble and Hinge and stuff who are looking for threesomes. But they’re just not being forthright about it in their profile or in person.So Feeldis a place where you literally could find a monogamous, heterosexual relationship on there. But also upfront, based on their profile next to like their favorite movies, also, like, their sexual fantasies. It’s a buggy app, t’s a glitchy app. It’s not a high end user experience sometimes, but I highly endorse it. Anyway.
Melissa: Is it the most awkward app to run a one of your parents on?
Amanda Montell: Oh my God. Holy fuck. You’re one of your, oh…
Courtney: That’s really dark. Like you really just have to twist the knife on that one.
Melissa: No, but I’m just like… I don’t… Nevermind. Yes, yes I did, apparently.
Amanda Montell: Yes, it would be. Yes, oh God. Now I’m thinking about my parents listening to this, but they won’t, thank God. They’re too busy and still married. So I, yeah, that would be really bad if I saw..
Melissa: Well, I’m just thinking like if it’s in the bio, it’s not like you just see the picture and your dad’s like name and age or something. You see their picture and then their sexual fantasy, and you’re like, “Oh my God, my dad’s furry experimental. What?”
Amanda Montell: Yeah, and you’re like, “Dad, you don’t even know like regular slang. How do you know all this kink lingo? Like where are your priorities?” Actually, I cosigned those priorities. Not for my dad. Fuck, ew! Okay, so I’m meeting most of these partners on Feeld, but I did actually, I think I met one of them on Bumble. And I really liked the sort of courting aspect. I’m bisexual. I just love the whole. I really do feel like I thrive in a group of three. In general, I love going out with two friends instead of just one. It like adds something fun to the mix.
Melissa: And look, we’re a group of three.
Amanda Montell:We’re a group of three.
Courtney: Wow. Yeah.
Amanda Montell: Whoa. This is a ménage à trois.
Melissa: A thruple. Temporary throuple.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, this is a mépod à trois sorry. That’s disgusting. Okay, yeah, we start having threesomes and it’s so fun actually. Like people, like female relationships get such a bad rap for being like overly complicated and dramatic and competitive. But I have like a bad relationship with every man I’ve ever dated or like they’re not in my life whatsoever. And every woman is, we’re friends. We root for each other. One of the women that I matched with on Feeld, who was like going to be our next threesome partner, except this guy blindsided me out of nowhere so we didn’t get to have the threesome. She’s now one of my closest friends. We were like, okay, let’s just be friends.
Courtney: Wow. Awesome.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, yeah.
Melissa: Kind of like a friend app too, like you can just make friends.
Amanda Montell: It really can be, yeah. And she meant the love of her life on there. Like it, I don’t know.
Courtney: Wow.
Amanda Montell: Everybody’s relationship to this app is obviously different, but I’ve had a great experience. So back to the song. This very serious guy…
Melissa: I forgot we were talking about a song.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, I know. I really derailed us, yeah. This guy’s persona is like very curated, and so his music taste was not music that’s necessarily easy on the ears. Like it’s music that’s almost daring you not to be smart enough to like it.
Courtney: Uh huhhhhhhh
Amanda Montell: That kind of stuff.
Courtney: Like say less. We definitely know these guys.
Melissa: Yeah, Yeah. Can you hear Courtney’s eye roll? Cause I could.
Courtney: I…Yeah. Too many of these guys in my life.
Amanda Montell: For sure. I was vibing with the Irish boy’s taste, like we just liked our pretty, vibing on a Saturday at 3:00 p.m. And you can sing along and it’s uncomplicated, but there’s still fun stuff happening. We were really getting along, so I ended up breaking things off with that Irish boy like to pursue this other relationship, this threesome guy. I’ll give him a code name. I’ll call him Harvard. So Harvard and I… ew, ew, no, I’m going back. I, I take that back. We’ll call him Hopkins. We’ll call him Hopkins. Okay, so Hopkins and I are like having these threesomes and he’s introducing me to music that’s hard to listen to. And in exchange, I’m bringing him the most fun he’ll ever have in his whole life. And also introducing him to like these cute little bops, including “Bedroom” by Litany. One of the most fun threesomes that we had — I’m not saying we had like dozens and dozens of threesomes. It makes it seem like it was my full-time job. It was just a side hustle.
Courtney: Okay, okay.
Melissa: Sounds like a lot of work.
Amanda Montell: It was a lot of work, but it was super fun and fulfilling, emotionally. It was good for the plot. So, there was this one day when we had already hooked up with this one girl, who I’m still friends with to this day. And we wanted to do it again. And I forget how we all agreed that this would be like a fun, hilarious thing to do, but it’s L.A. and they both had jobs that were not 9 to 5, like we were trying to find a time. And it was tough because like she worked at night and he was like, he was in a writer’s room and it was like the off season. So, like he had a lot of flexibility. And I worked during the day, but I was getting close to the time when I would be quitting that job. I was playing fast and loose with how much I was in the office. And I, we all decided like it would be baller if we like scheduled this threesome for the middle of the day on a Tuesday.
Courtney: Yeah, oh my gosh.
Amanda Montell: And I tell them all that I have an appointment, and that I had to leave at noon.
Melissa: Well, I mean it’s not totally a lie. You did have an appointment.
Amanda Montell: I did have an appointment. Yeah and um, I worked at this beauty and wellness website, and my coworker who I sat right next to was also my roommate. And this was a time when like CBD was really becoming like a huge thing. And we had a shit ton of free CBD gummies that we had been sent, like all sitting on our desks. And I remember my roommate/coworker that day was feeling really anxious and she decided to take a CBD gummy. And she did that right before I left. And our plan, the ménage à trois plan, was to like go have a midday Tuesday brunch, have like a mimosa or two, and then go back to my place and put on some tunes and like do this thing at one in the afternoon. So, then we go back to my apartment and the guy that is a part of this, puts on a playlist and he is like, “Oh, you know what would be a great vibe for this, a great soundtrack? Is this song that you introduced me to, “Bedroom” by Litany.” And he starts with that, and he like puts on a Litany like playlist, and it’s perfect. It’s like cute. It’s not too serious. That’s the thing is like I, I think like some people who haven’t had threesomes before think, “Oh my God, like how do you know where to put stuff?” Like it’s intimidating because it all has to be like so sexy and coordinated, and it can actually be like pretty silly and chill. This is the middle of the day. We’re just having kind of a like, a relaxed time. And literally like as things are like getting going, I hear the front door open and like my roommate comes home. And this was part of the draw of doing this in the middle of the day, is that like my roommate wouldn’t be home. I’m like, “Hold on a second. Sorry, y’all let me just see what’s going on.” And I like, check my phone. And it turns out that the CBD gummy, she thought she was taking actually like this massive dose of THC. So she, she realized that right after she took it and was like, she knew what was happening. She was like, “I cannot be at work, but I can’t go home.” So I think she like sat in her car for like an hour and a half while we were at brunch, just like waiting out until she was like not high enough to drive home. But she couldn’t be at work, so she like had to come home. So, she like came home in the middle of my midday Tuesday threesome, and I felt so bad for like everyone involved. It ended up completely fine. But, so this song is like a little bit ruined because… Well really actually, like I, I can still listen to this song and it makes me think of this whole experience, and I get a good chuckle out of it. But because that guy ended up breaking up with me in such a sort of uncalled for, like borderline sociopathic, manner, it taints my memories of these threesomes. And the most memorable of these threesomes was this one to “Bedroom” by Litany, and like indirectly Litany is kind of fucked. So to speak.
Courtney: We’ve had a few stories like this before; the indirect ruining of a song. Where like, because of your perception of a person, all the things about them now are ruined for you.
Amanda Montell: I know. Uh, and I, but I do have to remind myself, it’s like he was only one of the characters. That’s the fun of these three person situations is like only a third of that experience is tainted. The other partner is like, I think of them very fondly. And then I just remember the Irish boy and ah.. I feel like I betrayed him by taking this song that he introduced to me and then introducing that to someone who didn’t deserve it.
Courtney: Do you feel a sense of like wondering about what might have been with the Irish boy?
Amanda Montell: No, that was not gonna be right or pan out. No, I think of him very fondly. He was like a sweetheart.
Melissa: So I have a question though. What, who would plan the playlist for these? It sounds like he planned the playlist for this one. Like it, did you just have the song on a loop? Did you…?
Amanda Montell: That’s really, that sounds dystopian and jarring. It was one of those Spotify, go-to radio. We started with Litany and then we were playing all of Litany’’s discography, I suppose. Maybe “Bedroom” came on a couple times. It’s just such a, it’s such a bop, it’s like such a cute little song. It was more casual. And also like, the vibe of each of these threesome experiences was different. And you didn’t really know what the vibe was gonna be until the day. So, the first experience we had with this particular person was different than the midday brunch hooky threesome.
Courtney: I’ve put together make out playlists before, but it never works. Like it never connects, it never feels right, and it is totally down to the vibe of the day. Even knowing the vibe of the person, it doesn’t necessarily work because it’s just like, it needs to be more minute by minute.
Amanda Montell: Yeah.
Courtney: I mean, I have like had moments where I’ve had to turn music off because I’m like, this is not what’s happening right now. This is not congruent.
Amanda Montell: I think you can like get in your head a little bit cause you’re trying to like curate what it is. And this is what, just what I’m learning in life in general: You can’t curate anything cause, you know, it’s all gonna go to shit. You have to just go with the flow and like…
Courtney: You have to be in it. And if you’re listening to a playlist you like have preconceived, it pulls you out. It really does.
Amanda Montell: It does, it does. This is how I travel as well. It’s like I like to set some loose parameters and then have sort of spontaneity within the structure. And I think that goes for hookup playlists as well. It’s, oh, maybe — I know for sure I don’t want to listen to country music, but… That actually, you know what, that sounds like…
Melissa: You could, you absolutely could.
Amanda Montell: I have been line dancing recently. I go to like queer line dancing in Echo Park on Monday nights in L.A.
Melissa: Amazing.
Amanda Montell: Shout out to Stud Country, t’s my favorite thing. And I actually do think some country music is sexy, now. But I do think, actually, it sounds like kind of a fun game. If you’re like into goofy sex to put on like the least sexy playlist. Try to try to roll with it
Melissa: That would be amazing.
Courtney: Just like Conway Twitty and George Jones, that’s the least sexy.
Amanda Montell: Or like, I’m thinking maybe like show tunes? Like The Drowsy Chaperone.
Courtney: Shout to to Gianmarco and show tunes. We had this comedian on, and he was so great. And if you haven’t heard it and you’re listening now, it’s the second episode, so feel free to go back. But he was telling us about like how he made girls mixed tapes of show tunes, musical theater.
Amanda Montell: I fucking love that.
Courtney: We were like, wow how’s that mood?
Amanda Montell: Love that. Listen, I mentioned earlier, like after all of this like dating a predator, having a very experimental dating adulthood, I ended up back with someone I had a crush on when I was in high school. Who like I met doing community theater in middle school. So like there’s a lot of musical theater going on in this house.
Courtney: Oh, fascinating.
Melissa: That’s amazing.
Courtney: Have you the code on making musical theater sexy?
Amanda Montell: Honestly, yes, because there’s so much musical theater that’s like very nostalgic for us. And there’s something so cute…
Melissa: So just like Oklahoma every night?
Amanda Montell: No, um, no. Like we, uh, oh God, this is so cringe. I’ve been cringe literally this entire time, so I guess it’s fine, but, well he’s the composer. My boyfriend’s name is Casey. He’s a film and TV composer, and he plays the piano really beautifully. And we have this like 1920s era Wurlitzer player piano in our house. You can also play it like a regular piano. Or you can pedal these little pedals at the bottom and it will self play like old songs, you can put these little scrolls in it. And anyway, it’s a fun time. It’s a good party trick. But we’ll, like, gather around the piano and like sing harmonies to, you know, whatever. “There Were Bells on a Hill,” and I don’t know, like songs that we loved when we were growing up. That kind of like reminds each other of like our high school selves. And we had crushes on each other in high school and it’s, I don’t know, like kind of sexy and cute to tap into your high school self, like when you’re young.
Melissa: Yeah, no, I mean there’s so many like studies showing that those like neural pathways that get formed and during your first sort of like crushes in high school, like those are really powerful. And I know that the music that I listened to and like even just like seeing the people who I used to have crushes on, like it’s still really powerful. Like I don’t think it ever goes away. And I think ending up back with someone who you’d liked in high school, totally normal.
Amanda Montell: Mm-hmm, It’s funny, it just reminds me of that Sex and the City episode where she like goes on those dates with David Duchovny and she’s like, “I’ve been dating my whole adult life. We broke up cause I thought there were better fish in the sea. Turns out there aren’t.” And yeah, I don’t know. I think I’m always interested by what forms are type, what forms attraction. I think like people who were sweet to you, and maybe who you like made out with when you were young, Set the tone for what your type will be in the future. And yeah, I think like I’ve always dated people who have, who like reminded me a little bit of him for one reason or another. And so then it’s just, I mean, we ended up together 10 years after we had last even seen each other. And we grew up in Baltimore. There’s Hopkins, we only ended up using that code name once.I don’t know why we needed to put so much effort into that. But we both live in L.A., and we reconnected as adults in L.A. and that was very coincidental and fortuitous. And so it feels like we lived like this long life only to end up together in a way that feels, I don’t wanna be like fucking maudlin and gross and say meant to be, but it was just like we learned what we needed to learn, and here we are again.
Courtney: I’m so glad that you had a positive, formative romantic experience with someone though that has given you a pathway to like a healthy relationship because most of us haven’t, and are out here just messing up all the time still.
Amanda Montell: Oh, I messed up so much! Oh my God, endlessly. And there’s no happy ending. Like our relationship isn’t perfect, and we have stuff we need to work through all the time. But I do think it’s healthy.
Courtney: And this goes back to Melissa’s question, why do we always make it hard on ourselves? Why do we date men that are a challenge? And it’s those formative neural pathways and blaming them officially, scientifically.
Melissa: My friends and I in high school had what we called NGBs, which are Nice Guy But. He’s a nice guy, but… And like you can always, you can tell so quickly when someone’s like vibe is just a little bit off from what you actually want. Like they, they’re the nicest guy, but it’s just not there.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, surely like if you’re attracted to someone you can think of other ways to describe them than just nice.
Melissa: Yeah, nice is sort of a, it is a four letter word, isn’t it?
Courtney: All right. I’m gonna tell a story now about a song that an ex ruined into that is in the vein of your ruining. By contamination, ruined by contamination. I recently broke up with my boyfriend, and the good news is I don’t have to listen to the Grateful Dead anymore, ever again.
Amanda Montell: Oh, that’s amazing news.
Courtney: Yeah, so that’s a huge weight off my shoulders. But here’s the song that ruined for me. So whenever we were first dating, we had this one extremely like romantic, straight out of a John Hughes movie moment where we were at his house sitting on the floor and I was looking through his record collection cause I wanted to like, it was early days, and I wanted to suss him out. And it was all his records from high school and they were so good. Like his taste of music was so good. I was stunned, like truly blown away. And so we put on the Psychedelic Furs and it’s the album with all the hits, “Pretty in Pink,” and just all the songs that you know from them. And start making out like over the record player. And I was like, this is literally… substitute in a cake and it’s the end of Sixteen Candles. This is, I can’t believe this is a thing that really happenes. It’s crazy.
Melissa: The dream.
Courtney: It’s the dream, it’s the dream. And now the dream is ruined forever because he sucks. He’s over.
Amanda Montell:Yeah, I know. And here’s the thing, and like I’ve had to move through this and my relationship is different to it all the time.It’s like when you break up with someone and move on from someone who mistreated you in some way, it’s really hard not to be like that person is the Antichrist. And every experience I had with them is invalid and I was an idiot for wasting my time with them. And I think that can be overly self punishing. There had to be a reason why you were together. Like even in the relationship that I was in for seven years with someone who I think really abused his power over me, like there still were good things in that relationship. And there still were good memories and I was not just a fucking idiot and a weakling for being in that.I like have to remind myself of that because sometimes we’re really hard on ourselves and we’re like, “How did I not, how did I not fucking see? How did I not fucking see?” And some of the smartest people in the world can’t see .
Courtney: Yeah, well, I mean, it’s, for me, it’s like I wouldn’t have this big of a problem — you said something that described what happened to me. The blindside breakup. Where it’s just, this is immature and undignified and you have negated everything. You’re— all of your credibility, all of my trust.
Amanda Montell: I know. It sucks, it sucks. It’s so cowardly.
Courtney: Yeah, and selfish and so self-serving. Going back and thinking about when I was young, people that I broke up with like that, and why I don’t break up with people that way anymore. And wow, have I just been feeling a huge guilt trip about people that I did that to in my 20s.
Melissa: Oh, but at least when in your 20s you’re young though. You don’t really have the prefrontal cortex. You didn’t make bad choices.
Courtney: I know. I was over 25. I was fully developed, but I was still making bad choices.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, it’s tough. It is super, super tough.
Courtney: I also wanna talk to you about cults a little bit. I used to be at Refinery 29 as a writer. And I know you’ve written for them. And there was a whole period in 2018 where everybody was really obsessed with cults there. And we did cults Fridays for like a whole summer.
Amanda Montell: Yeah, Cult Fridays.I think I, I interviewed a writer who did Cult Fridays.
Courtney: I wrote a piece for it about cults using music as a part of their mind control.
Amanda Montell: I read that, I read that. I remember, I remember reading that.
Courtney: It was fascinating. The part that was most fascinating was the woman who’d been— grown up in the Moonies and she talked about how they didn’t like popular culture of any sort and they didn’t let them sing any kind of music, pop music. But they would take some pop songs and turn them into Moonie songs, like Dylan and Beatles songs and just do different words to them that were about the religion. And it was, she was like, “It was wild, like the way that we would be in a room all singing together and it was like you would meld into one mind.” And it was a whole part of the indoctrination. And I was like, wait, literally, how is this different from Christianity?
Amanda Montell: Yeah, no, it’s not. That’s the first thing that came to mind. I like write about this a little bit in Cultish, my book, which is about the language of cults from Scientology to SoulCycle, and how the same linguistic techniques are used across this wide spectrum of groups. And early on in the book, I talk a little bit about how— my dad is a cult survivor, for context. He spent his teenagers in a pretty notorious cult called Synanon. And I grew up on his stories, and I started noticing Synanon-esque cult influence everywhere, like all over culture in, throughout my childhood and an adulthood of course. And in middle school — I grew up like very reformed Jewish — in middle school, my best friend’s mom was a born again Christian. And I would sometimes, like out of anthropological curiosity, accompany them to their evangelical megachurch. And they really thought that like, Christian rock music with those characteristically pleasant chord progressions, that was the Holy Spirit. It was so transcendent. And music is social adhesive and it does — I don’t know the neuroscience, but it really like taps into your emotions and can make you feel like you’re having a profound metaphysical experience. I’m an atheist and I have like truly what I would consider spiritual experiences with music at a, especially live music. But I guess, no, I don’t, I don’t think I’ve ever been in a concert environment that felt as like exploitative as that megachurch. I’m trying to think.
Courtney: Soyou never saw the Polyphonic Spree live, you’re saying?
Amanda Montell: No, but I, but there was this sense in that megachurch that they were really trying to break people down and tap into people’s vulnerability with music in order to communicate a dogma. Music is a great tool for that.
Courtney: Yeah, well, I mean, the other thing it does is make you feel like all those dopamine and the bonding hormones. And that’s why it’s a great tool for having a make out playlist or why — this whole podcast — its why somebody can ruin a song for you.
Melissa: It is also why — I’m working on a podcast right now, it’s coming out soon — but it’s about how every cult leader puts out an album. And just that continuation of their like narcissistic personality.
Amanda Montell: Oh my God, totally. There’s something about a rockstar that is even more God-like than an actor or any other kind of celebrity or authority figure. Like music is akin to spiritual authority in a way, so it makes sense that, that every cult leader would start a band. Should I start a band? I’m kidding.
Melissa: Yeah, let’s start a band. That’ll be great. So I feel like we should wrap this up, but can you tell people where they can find you?
Amanda Montell: Yeah, I do not talk about threesomes anywhere else, so this was like super out of left field. But I do talk about other fun stuff, including cults in my book, Cultish: the Language of Fanaticism, which is also available in audiobook forum. I also have a book called Word Slut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language, and I have a podcast called sounds Like a Cult, which is available on all major podcast platforms.
Melissa: Thank you so much for joining us, and telling us about a song that your ex ruined. These songs are really hard to reclaim, but I also feel like people really need to try because if it’s a bop, and it’s good enough to soundtrack a threesome, you should reclaim it.
Amanda Montell: I’m just gonna have to have a new threesome.
Melissa:There you go.
Courtney: Thanks for joining us for another episode of Songs My Ex Ruined. If you’re enjoying the podcast, give us a review or rating on your favorite app and it will really help. And hey, subscribe to get new episodes as soon as they drop.
Melissa: Songs My Ex Ruined is a production of Nevermind Media. Executive producers are Melissa Locker and Courtney E. Smith. Produced and edited by Stephanie Aguilar. Sound design and theme song by Madeline McCormick. Artwork by Sophie Locker. Additional production support from Casey, Steve, Archer, Beemo, Newton, and all the other good dogs and cats out there.
