27 Club: My Table in the Back

For the ones I loved before I knew how to live without them.

(Let this one play. It's not background. It’s the ghost in the room.)

There’s a door I used to dream about.
It sat at the edge of every all-nighter, every half-finished bottle, every poem I never let anyone read.
A door carved from rhythm, lit by stage lights and ashtrays.
Behind it?
The 27 Club.

I used to stare at it like a challenge.
Part of me wanted in.
Not out of some cliché addiction to tragedy—but because I thought that’s what happened to people who felt everything too hard
and still found a way to make it sound beautiful.

I used to have “Wait” by M83 as my morning alarm.
Not because I wanted to wake up.
But because I needed something that sounded like the inside of me.
Something slow.
Something sad without trying.
Something that felt like it could shatter — and still didn’t.

That was my first ritual.
Letting the synth bleed into daylight,
pretending it was enough to keep me here.

I had a list.
A private pantheon.
The saints I prayed to when I didn’t believe in God but still believed in something.

Jim Morrison was the first one I let into my bloodstream.
Not the cleaned-up one they put on posters,
but the man who opened doors with his hips and his howl.
He made the erotic sacred.
He made chaos a sermon.
Every word he slurred felt like a dare to the heavens:
watch me want, watch me burn, and do nothing.
He died in a bathtub in Paris,
but part of me thinks he just slipped between dimensions,
left his body as a bad tip and walked out barefoot into something we’ll never understand.

Then came Hendrix,
the man who played like the world owed him nothing but breath and a bent string.
His guitar was more honest than most people I know.
He didn’t shred to impress—he shredded because language wasn’t enough.
He made distortion sound like divinity,
like the last cry of the universe before it collapses into itself.
And he did it with grace.
Even his breakdowns were symphonies.

I hear him in every loop I build,
every time I break structure just to feel something real.
The kind of real that hums beneath the lyrics of Wait,
where nothing is said, but everything’s admitted.

Kurt Cobain didn’t teach me how to scream.
He taught me how to whisper through the wound.
His voice was a bruise in slow motion.
He made pain sound casual.
Like, yeah—I hurt. You too? Cool. Let’s play a show.

There’s a photo of him with chipped nail polish and sadness in his spine.
He looks like he’s apologizing for breathing.
That was the part I understood best.
The way he wrote like the mic was a confession booth
and we were all just sinners hoping the distortion would absolve us.

Robert Johnson is the root.
The myth at the center of the fire.
They say he sold his soul at the crossroads.
But maybe he just understood what the world demanded of Black genius—
and he made a deal with the only power that would listen.

He played like his fingers knew secrets.
Like the devil wasn’t scary—just misunderstood.
Every note was a risk.
Every lyric a spell.
He made suffering sound like prophecy.

He was dead before vinyl even knew his name.
And still—he started everything.

Janis Joplin was the first woman I ever wanted to write for.
Not to impress her.
Not to sleep with her.
Just to hold her in words.

She was pure ache.
She didn’t sing—she exhaled pain with melody.
And no one ever taught her how to dim it down.

I see her in women I love.
The ones who drink too much, love too fast, and cry like it’s a form of art.
She was messy. God, yes.
But she was honest.
And there’s nothing more terrifying than a woman who feels without apology.

Amy Winehouse brought jazz to the wreckage.
She made eyeliner and addiction look like armor.
She crooned through heartbreak like she wanted you to taste the bitterness.
Like she wasn’t singing to heal—she was singing to remember.

There’s a photo of her barefoot, holding a drink and looking exhausted.
It’s beautiful.
Not because she’s tragic.
But because even ruined, she was divine.
She made vulnerability sound expensive.
Like the piano line of Wait—
each note falling like a dress down a hallway no one walks anymore.

Then there’s Basquiat.
King without a kingdom.
Child of war paint and gallery lights.
He painted like his hands were on fire
and the canvas was the only place he could scream without getting arrested.

His art was gospel with graffiti lungs.
He turned trauma into royalty,
crowned himself in chaos,
and still asked to be seen.

I think of him every time I try to price my work.
Every time I wonder if it’s too raw, too Black, too loud, too much.
Then I remember—that’s the point.

Some of us don’t need a needle to overdose.
We do it with memory.
With grief.
With mornings that start with a song and end with silence.

But that’s not the whole truth.
Not the part I’ve never said out loud.

This is where most will stop.
But you? You already know the door’s open.
Keep going — if you need to.