If I could disappear into one summer night, put me in bell-bottom jeans dancing in the headlights of a burnt-orange ’74 Dodge Tradesman with bubble windows and shag carpet while somebody digs through the vinyl trying to find the next song. Cheyenne Pohl brings that whole fantasy into ‘That’s My Kind of Crazy’, a sunny retro-soul track built for the girl who has already decided normal sounds wildly overrated. Retro soul pulls from that late-’60s and early-’70s pocket where Motown polish started getting looser and funkier before disco fully took over the party, and Cheyenne wears that throwback spirit without making the song feel trapped in somebody else’s decade. The melodies are bright enough to make you want the windows down while the whole attitude says life gets considerably more fun once you quit auditioning for everybody else’s approval. Personally, if somebody thinks my dancing is weird, they are welcome to stand somewhere farther away from the fucking speakers.
Cheyenne makes independence sound less like rebellion and more like a woman who already knows what kind of life actually feels good to her. When she sings “I’ve never been the one to play along / Groovin’ to an unfunky beat / I’ll never work a real nine to five / Just to make ends meet,” she is rejecting the version of adulthood where success comes prepackaged with somebody else’s rules. She is not throwing a tantrum about convention because she genuinely has better things to do with her time. That makes the confidence feel lighter and a hell of a lot more attractive, because living differently gets easier once you stop treating other people’s expectations like homework you forgot to turn in.
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Her happiness already has a pulse before anybody else walks into the picture, which gives the song a really lovely kind of freedom. “I’m gonna do it my own way / I will dance at the dawn / I’m never really lonely / Even when I’m alone” shows a woman who enjoys herself enough that company becomes a bonus instead of an emergency. A boyfriend can absolutely join the fun and preferably look hot doing it, but he is not being hired to rescue her from her own Saturday night. I love that energy because there is something deeply girly about building a life you already adore and then deciding who gets invited into it.
The chorus takes that confidence somewhere even better because the real point is not perfection, it is participation. In “That’s my kinda crazy / Give me a good song I dance it all night long / I sing it to my baby / Probably get it wrong / But I don’t care at all,” Cheyenne would rather throw herself completely into the moment than stand against the wall monitoring how she looks from somebody else’s phone. That kind of freedom is ridiculously attractive because self-consciousness has ruined enough damn parties already. She is giving us the girl who commits to having fun before she knows whether anybody else approves, and that feels much closer to actual confidence than trying to look effortlessly cool all night.
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Pennsylvania-based Cheyenne Pohl likes her pop with enough soul and funk underneath it to keep the whole thing from sitting politely in a chair, while her songwriting stays rooted in whatever real life is currently throwing at her. Love and figuring yourself out give her plenty to work with, and she has been building momentum through new releases while bringing that same personality into her live performances. There is something wonderfully fitting about her landing on ‘That’s My Kind of Crazy’ because the song sounds like an artist getting increasingly comfortable making the kind of music she wants without sanding off the parts that make her interesting. Frankly, if you are going to build a career around being yourself, you may as well turn the volume up.
I am keeping the fantasy of that burnt-orange van because ‘That’s My Kind of Crazy’ makes ordinary Friday-night plans feel embarrassingly underdressed. Cheyenne understands that being completely yourself gets a lot easier once you stop waiting for somebody else to confirm you are doing it correctly. Give me the records and those ridiculous jeans, then point the headlights toward somewhere we can stay up too late. If that qualifies as crazy, I have heard much worse fucking plans.
