208. Song No. 3,158: “Ex’s and Oh’s,” Elle King
Love Stuff, 2015

At the end of his commuting era, there was a brief and beautiful moment when my husband, a former goth kid whose taste in music skews more toward metal and thrashier, grittier bands than mine ever will, got hooked on one of the local indie/college radio stations and constantly told me about new-to-us bands and songs he very correctly thought I’d love.

Among those gems was Elle King, to whom hubs introduced me with a delighted “You’ll never guess who her father is!” (It’s SNL‘s Rob Schneider, which still does not compute all these years later.)

I’ll admit that I have historically gravitated to male singers—blame it on having a lower voice and also a deep-rooted envy of women who can actually carry a tune without dropping it—so it used to be rare for a female song-slinger to make an immediately positive impression on me. But something about Elle King’s throaty rasp, bluesy old-soul music and irresistibly liberated sense of self just sucked me right into Love Stuff.

This single is what sunk its claws into me the most (though the contrarian “America’s Sweetheart” also got me good and felt almost uncomfortably relevant while I was navigating a male-dominated industry that was fond of me for all the wrong reasons). “Ex’s and Oh’s” is one of those everybody-sounds-good singalongs so dripping with attitude and sauciness and a livewire electricity that even my terminal suspicion of popular things whole-heartedly embraced it.

For being a song itemizing all the ex-lovers littering King’s past, the details were never what matters to me: It’s the confidence and devil-may-care nonchalance that made it a weirdly empowering on-the-road anthem that got me through entirely too many too-early morning routines at trade shows, meetings and other hellscape mainstays of a too-extroverted life I’ve put behind me with a great deal of relief. Belated apologies to any long-ago occupants of shared-wall hotel rooms who were unwillingly privy to my 5 a.m. shower concerts, 5:30 a.m. pep-talk concerts accompanying laborious hot-roller applications and 6 a.m. heavy-handed makeup-application-ritual-turned-recital, but Elle King and “Ex’s and Oh’s” made me feel so much cooler than I’ve ever been and more confident than I’d ever be in a parade of coast-to-coast hotel rooms, curious titular punctuation choices notwithstanding.