I have a thing I do when I’m getting ready to go out and I’ve never said it out loud because it would make me sound unhinged. I put the music so loud I can feel it and then do my makeup with a level of focus I genuinely cannot apply to anything else in my life and I build the version of myself that’s about to walk out that door and have the best fucking night. Most nights it works. Some nights I’m at the pregame laughing and pouring drinks while a second voice underneath it all runs a completely different conversation that nobody else can hear, and the whole time I’m being the person everyone came to see and keeping that shit entirely to myself. That voice has zero interest in the night going well and I smile at whoever’s talking to me and keep it locked so far down that even I can’t locate it half the time. Shelby Sanborn made ‘Monsters’ for that voice, and she did it without blinking.
‘Monsters’ is Shelby going somewhere most artists are too scared to go and making it sound effortless. The song lives in that specific headspace where the loudest noise in the room is coming from inside you, and as a neurodivergent artist who has been processing the hard stuff through music since she was barely a teenager, she connects to this material in a way that stops you cold because it’s fucking real and you can hear it in every second of her performance. Blake Roses produced it, whose credits include Drake Bell and Cayley Spivey, and the production serves the song the way good production damn well should, getting the hell out of the way and letting Shelby do her thing. Writer Helena Lynch described it as bringing “emotional depth without overdoing it, and artistry without the glitter,” which is about as accurate as music writing gets. This is not a song that performs its feelings. It has them, fully and without apology, and if you’ve ever spent 2am losing a fight with something you can’t name or explain and feeling like an absolute ass for struggling with it, this shit is going to stay with you.
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The song opens with a setup that anyone who lives with intrusive thoughts is going to recognize immediately. Shelby describes being okay, genuinely okay, until she isn’t, and the shift happens in a single line: “Till the evil voice creeps up inside.” That’s the whole experience of a mind that turns on itself condensed into eight words. She follows it with the line that gives the whole song its emotional center: “I didn’t choose to think this way.” Four seconds in and she’s already said the thing that people who struggle with this spend years trying to convince other people of. The second verse goes deeper into what it feels like when the mind won’t stay quiet and the loops that won’t stop running and the way nighttime becomes its own kind of battle. She’s not dramatizing any of it. She’s just describing a Tuesday that’s going to shit and she can’t explain why.
Then the chorus arrives and Shelby goes full spiral. “Knocking down the doors of my sanity / Dissecting the past for a remedy / I’ll die for the cure of certainty / What’s wrong with me.” The desperation here is real and specific. She’s actively dismantling herself looking for an answer – going through everything that’s ever happened trying to find the reason she is the way she is and coming up fucking empty. “What’s wrong with me” as a closing line is the question that sits underneath every single thing she’s described, and she’s not asking it for effect. She actually needs an answer. Before this chorus she describes her rage as something physical, boiling past any reasonable limit, which reframes everything: this is exhausted, furious searching, and she doesn’t give a damn if that makes people uncomfortable.
What’s going to make anyone who has ever heard “just be grateful” want to throw something through a wall is the verse where Shelby turns the criticism back on the people doing it. “Everybody says to just be grateful / If they read my mind how would they feel.” She’s not asking for pity. She’s asking a direct question – if you could actually see what’s happening in here would you still say that? The answer is obvious and she knows it. That verse takes the song out of pure personal suffering and makes it a confrontation with every person who has ever minimized what someone else is going through because it didn’t look bad enough from the outside. Sanborn delivers it cold as hell without a trace of self-pity which is what makes it stick.
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By the bridge, Shelby stops holding anything back. The lines about losing patience and the feeling of a life being wasted build to the one moment that stops you completely: “Tryna be the girl that’s so damn happy.” That’s it. That’s the whole performance of wellness that people who struggle internally know better than anyone. You’re trying to be her. You know who she is. You just can’t always get there. Then the outro delivers the title and closes everything out: “the monsters have me now but I’ll be fine.” She’s not claiming victory or declaring herself fixed. She’s just saying she’ll be fine, which is a completely different thing, and more believable than any triumphant ending would have been.
Shelby Sanborn is a San Diego singer-songwriter who figured out she had a voice at four years old and spent the next nine years deciding what to do with it, landing on writing her own songs at thirteen because covering other people’s work was never going to be enough. She’s classically trained with a palette that pulls from Frank Sinatra and Avril Lavigne, which produces this pop-indie sound that’s sophisticated as hell without being the least bit precious about it. She won first place at the San Diego Fair’s youth singing competition at sixteen performing her own original song “Gravity,” which is the kind of early win that tells you someone is the real fucking deal before they’ve even graduated high school. She’s been working rooms like Harrah’s and the Hilton Bayfront Hotel while simultaneously studying at Berklee College of Music, which is a shit-ton to carry and she makes it look effortless. Her voice moves from a deep, rolling lower register to notes that go somewhere most singers don’t even attempt, and she plays piano and guitar with the ease of someone who’s been living inside music since before she could properly reach the keys. Shelby Sanborn is hauling ass toward something big and you’d be a damn fool to sleep on her.
I got home at 2am last Saturday and took my makeup off and sat in the quiet for a while, which is the part of the night nobody posts about. That’s when the second voice gets its time, when there’s nothing left to perform for and nowhere left to put it. Shelby Sanborn called it ‘Monsters’ and said she’ll be fine, and honestly? Me too. I just needed someone to say it out loud first.
