Song & Story Vol. 1: Worry About You x The Hollow

My new project Song & Story is about following the feeling I get when a song and a story seem to be evoking the same emotion, or accomplishing the same task through different mediums.

For the first installment, I looked into why a Hollywood movie soundtrack and a Nigerian short story were leaving me with the same haunting feeling.

The song: “Worry About You”, by singer and actress Chloe Bailey, from the soundtrack to Strung, a 2026 psychological thriller from Blumhouse. Listen to the track here.

The story: “The Hollow”, the 2023 O. Henry Award-winning short story by ‘Pemi Aguda, about a house that protects the women inside it by turning on the men. Read the story here.

Start with the strings in “Worry About You”. In the intro and for most of the song, a violin and a cello play the same line a few octaves apart: one sound is bright on top and the other sound is dark beneath it, both saying the same thing at once. It’s beautiful, but it also sounds like the cello is grounding, warning, calling the listener to pay more attention.

This is how the haunted house in Aguda’s story works, too. It loves women and kills men in the same breath. The house’s protection and its violence go together this way: tender and threatening, the same note in two octaves.

My favorite part of the song is how Chlöe does something small and telling. She sings most of the song plainly, with restraint, until the word I. In the line “I worry about you”, she stretches that monosyllabic I into two notes, starting low and stepping upward. This comes off as reaching, or faltering and trying again… like someone convincing themself that the I is still in control.

It also sounds like the beginning of a scream. Chilling.

Aguda loads a small unit in the same way, and this, too, is my favorite part of her haunting story. Twice, she uses the phrase “friction, friction”: a plain, physical word, doubled. She takes a small, innocent unit and darkens its meaning in the doubling, to hold both physicality and vengeance, just as Chlöe splits a syllable so I can hold a step followed by a reach.

Both the writer and the singer hide weight in a small place, letting repetition carry meaning.

And then comes the fall.

At the end of “Worry About You”, the piano chords walk downward, a haunting descent that feels like retreating from a predator. Aguda’s prose moves in the same wrong direction: “a fear clunks up her ribs… a fear that nothing is real and everything is upside down”.

In both worlds, safety is an illusion, and collapse is lurking at the bottom.

If a song or story has ever taken you somewhere you weren’t ready to go, tell me which one. I’d love to dive in.

Watch me talk about this on Instagram.