There’s always one fucking song that should come with an after-midnight warning label. It comes on and suddenly I’m reopening a case that everybody else thought was closed. I remember what he said, what I should have said and the one facial expression that probably meant nothing but has somehow been entered into evidence. Now I’m lying there pissed off at a man who is presumably sleeping beautifully while my brain has scheduled a fucking retrial. Elly Poletti knows the shift. One minute you’re trying to fall asleep and the next your own head has become the worst person in the room. On her first self-penned single, Stranger in My Head, she writes about getting so deep inside your thoughts that eventually you stop recognizing the woman having them.
Producer David Prideaux recorded Stranger in My Head with Elly at Sunderland Studios on Phillip Island, bringing in Melbourne musicians remotely and building beyond the song she originally imagined. Elly specifically credits Prideaux with finding instrumental layers and backing harmonies she hadn’t anticipated. That matters on a song where so much of the tension comes from what keeps accumulating inside her head. The soul and jazz foundation feels natural for a singer who has spent years performing Amy Winehouse and Aretha Franklin, but this time there’s nowhere to hide inside somebody else’s words. These are hers.
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The first verse drops us straight into the shitty part of the night. “Bitter dreams and sweaty nights / Tossing and turning this don’t feel right.” Then the radio starts serving memories she definitely did not order. “The radio turns on songs of memories / Dangling out those heart string keys.” Every woman has at least one song capable of ruining an otherwise stable Tuesday. You hear the first few seconds and suddenly you remember his apartment, the argument and why you should have deleted his number sooner. Thanks, Spotify. I was trying to brush my teeth.
Elly wants the thoughts gone. “Make it stop these tempting thoughts / Feelings of anger going back and forth.” That back-and-forth is where the song gets painfully familiar because anger loves an imaginary conversation. You say his part for him and then destroy the argument you invented on his behalf. Congratulations, babe. You won a fight against a man who isn’t fucking there. Meanwhile Elly admits she wants “a clear head” while knowing she has “this way of not doing what is said.” Self-awareness has entered the chat. Unfortunately, it brought no sleeping pills.
Then she gets to the line that makes the whole thing nastier. “If I take away my pride / What have I got left inside?” Fuck. Pride is apparently doing some heavy lifting here. It can keep you upright after something hurts while quietly becoming the reason you keep replaying the hurt. Elly follows it with “I play things out in my head / Avoid the road ahead,” and there’s the trap. Looking backward gives her something familiar to fight. Moving forward means walking into something she can’t rehearse first.
The chorus turns that private spiral into an alarm. “Danger Danger” gives way to “Stranger Stranger,” until Elly finally admits “that’s what I’ve become / a stranger in my head.” I love that title because the scary person isn’t waiting outside the bedroom. She’s already under the covers with you. She knows every insecurity and exactly which memory to pull at 2:13 a.m. when you have work in the morning. Your brain should legally be required to shut the fuck up after midnight.
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“This abstract world that we fall in” pushes her farther into that internal place while she’s trying to get herself away from it. She doesn’t name what originally caused the anger or tell us who put those memories there, and I’m good with that. The specificity is in what her mind does afterward. By the bridge she’s asking to be taken somewhere she belongs because the feelings inside are too strong to make sense of. The song leaves us with that tension unresolved, which feels appropriate when the problem is your own head. You can block a guy. The bitch running the 2 a.m. screening room has your password.
Elly Poletti has spent years singing other women’s stories. The Cowes, Australia vocalist built her name across Melbourne’s jazz and soul scene, including stages at Paris Cat Jazz Club and Birds Basement, while interpreting artists including Amy Winehouse and Adele. Stranger in My Head marks the first time she has released a song she wrote herself, and getting here took four years. Elly has spoken about comparing her own writing to the iconic artists she covers and the vulnerability that came with finally putting her material forward. There’s something deliciously fitting about making your songwriting debut with a track called Stranger in My Head. After years of borrowing other women’s lyrics, the first woman Elly introduces us to in her own writing is the one she’s been stuck alone with.
That woman is still awake when I leave her. There’s no neat little morning-after scene where the thoughts disappear and everybody drinks green juice. I prefer it this way. Some nights your brain drags old shit out of storage and you spend hours arguing with memories that cannot argue back. Elly finally gave that woman in her head a microphone. Turns out the stranger had been waiting four fucking years to use it.
