Musician Jared Choeft suffers from a subtype of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder known as “Just Right OCD.” The condition manifests as an intense need for his actions to be carried out in a manner that feels precise, correct, “just right.” This desire leads to repetitive behaviours other people would judge as unnecessary. When trying to complete a task, even one that might appear inconsequential, Choeft is compelled to repeat the process, again and again, until a sense of balance or satisfaction is achieved. If he stopped short, the anxiety would be blinding.
Choeft finds his OCD keenly affects the parts of his life that he cares about the most, including, of course, his music.
Based in Fargo, North Dakota, Choeft records and performs a folky, whimsical style of classical music alongside his wife, Amanda — Jared often behind the piano and Amanda on the flute. When working on his compositions, Choeft can agonize over decisions such as how a melody or harmony should develop. But his OCD reveals itself in more innocuous ways too. As part of his process, Choeft uses musical notation software that turns his pieces into sheet music. He finds himself continually logging the same information into the computer. Choeft will repeat rituals such as dragging text or dynamic markings back and forth, moving the cursor along an arbitrary path, falling into cycles of undoing and redoing actions on screen until they feel… just right. A task that should take a second or two can stretch to minutes.
“I would use the word ‘hell’ to describe it,” Choeft tells me. “It’s just so painful.”
Everyone recognizes the three letters, and yet, OCD remains a highly misunderstood and misinterpreted condition. It’s most closely associated with cleanliness and attentiveness, with glove-wearing chief germaphobe Melvin Udall from As Good as It Gets providing the prototypical idea of how a person with OCD behaves. OCD does present as traits such as excessive hand washing and lock checking, but this association has fostered stereotypes and misconceptions that it is simply the impulse to be organized or tidy. This often leads to trivialization. It’s common to hear people describing themselves as a “little bit OCD” because they like things a certain way. What they miss is the anxiety experienced by true sufferers.
Lesser known symptoms include morbid obsessions and intrusive thoughts, sometimes of a violent nature. This naturally leads to the fear of psychosis or losing one’s mind. OCD can be painful, paralyzing, repulsive, and debilitating. The symptoms can feel unspeakable and, therefore, isolating. OCD doesn’t just implore, it torments.
But the antidote to medical myths is conversation and knowledge, so by speaking openly about their own experiences with OCD, pop stars have been contributing to the busting of misinformation and improvement of the collective understanding. Ariana Grande, PinkPantheress, and Luke Combs are among the artists to open up about how their OCD affects how they perform, how they write, how they move through the world. “When it hits, man, it can be all consuming,” Combs said in an interview. “If you have a flare up of it, right, you could think about it 45 seconds of every minute for weeks.”
To describe his OCD, Combs uses the term “Pure O” to signal that his symptoms play out internally, without a physical compulsion. (It should be noted that some organizations, including the American Psychiatric Association and OCD UK, do not endorse the expression.) The highly popular English singer-songwriter George Ezra has also spoken about his experiences with the same condition. “Whilst everything’s going on in your head, you’re vacant to the world around you and you’re not really there,” he told the How Do You Cope podcast.
Ezra always knew there was something in his brain constantly tugging at him, forcing him down corridors of his mind that he did not want to go. Yet he made it all the way to adulthood without being able to put a name to the demon. Ezra already had a number one album on his list of achievements when, while recording his second LP, it finally hit him that he had a recognizable condition and that condition was OCD. “I heard about it and instantly there wasn’t a doubt in my mind,” Ezra recalled. “I said, ‘That’s it. That’s what’s going on. That’s what I’m experiencing.’ In hindsight, this is something that I had my whole life.” Since diagnosis, he has been inspired to depict his OCD through songwriting.
This moment of realization is similar to Choeft’s experience. He was finally diagnosed with OCD around age 27, but had been experiencing symptoms since childhood. As it happens, this mirrors my own story. I was in my mid-twenties when the notion came over me to look up OCD online. Immediately, I recognised in this condition what I’d been suffering from since childhood. I’ve since undergone therapy and counselling, but nothing was as important as first discovering that I wasn’t alone — that the demon in my mind wasn’t unique to me. This sometimes decades-long lag in people experiencing OCD and recognizing they have OCD is attributable, I believe, to the poor information circling about the condition — sufferer’s themselves often don’t know what they have. And so the pushing of misconceptions is not without collateral damage.
One fallacy unique to artists: that having OCD is like a superpower that increases their attentiveness to their craft (“superpower” is a common trope applied to different mental disorders). Of course, many people are particular about the work, but OCD is almost always an impediment, rarely an advantage.
“I think a common [misconception] I get is people will tell me, ‘Yeah, I have OCD too. I just get really zoned in on something I’m doing and nothing can pull me away from it,’ or something like that,” describes Christine Goodwyne, the singer and lead songwriter of the band Pool Kids. “If you have OCD, when you’re doing compulsions, sure they bring you temporary relief or whatever, but overall it’s this feeling of dread and doom. If you are being OCD about being perfect, it’s not like you’re enjoying it, you know what I mean? It’s a burden and it’s a very negative, bad experience.”
Goodwyne cites her compulsion to record everything she’s working on as an example of a symptom. She also finds herself constantly making notes, not to be fastidious, but because of a fear of forgetting something that might someday be useful, even if these ideas soon become lost in a sea of unusable material. “It can hold you back because you feel like you’re drowning,” she says.
For Pool Kids, 2025 has brought new success and attention. The Tallahassee band’s third album, Easier Said Than Done, was received with acclaim. It was during the promotion of the project that Goodwyne began to speak about her OCD more than ever before — how it affects her as a person and creative. She’s open about how OCD is weaved into the album’s themes. On “Bad Bruise,” she sings, “Can’t help but try to touch it like a bad bruise,” sharply comparing her compulsions with the impulse to touch a physical bruise. “You can’t help but resist and give in to it,” she tells me, “even though you know it’s bad for you and it hurts.” There’s also the song “Leona Street,” inspired by Goodwyne’s realization that she was being, “OCD about trying to fix my OCD, where I was scanning every thought that I had and trying to figure out how to perfectly handle every thought. And I was doing all these rituals that I thought were going to help me, I don’t know, fix my mental health, but I ended up making it worse because I realized I was just giving into a different type of compulsion.”
“Which is Worse” delves into the role memory plays in grief, with Goodwyne drawing interesting parallels between hoarding as people understand it, and the idea of memory hoarding. “I think people don’t see or don’t realize the connection of hoarding with OCD,” she says. “Memory hoarding is a thing. When dealing with grief, I have gone through phases where I try to obsessively write out every memory I had with the person because I have this fear of forgetting. But then it gets to the point where it’s compulsive and you have pages and pages where you’re trying to record every thought and every memory you ever had with someone. So yeah, ‘Which is Worse’ is saying, ‘Is it worse to forget about someone and not have to deal with the pain of remembering their memories, or is it worse to have to be obsessively keeping track of the memories?’”
For some artists, having music as an outlet has proved soothing. Ariana Grande has asserted that the creative process has helped her find relief from intrusive thoughts and compulsions. Others, though, are uncomfortable with the trope that art is automatically remedial. While Goodwyne has used her songwriting to depict, probe, and make sense of her OCD, she rejects the idea that songwriting is somehow therapeutic.
“Everyone’s always like, ‘So how is it like therapy to you?’ And I’m like, ‘What if it’s not?’ Because I always say I don’t feel like I get a practical effect out of songwriting. It doesn’t do something, or help anything, about my mental health. I’m a musician and I just like to create and write songs. And that’s why I do that. It’s really not therapy to me. And it’s crazy how everyone seems to assume that and then it seems like every other artist agrees and says it is. And I’m wondering if they’re just going along with it. I’m like, ‘Are they all lying? There’s no way I’m the only person who doesn’t find this therapeutic?’ I don’t find songwriting therapeutic. It’s just something I enjoy doing.”
Choeft also became interested in expressing his OCD experience through music when he had a hard time finding work that specifically tackled the subject. “It felt like something that really needed to be expressed,” he says. “There’s been many pieces over the years that have about kinds of mental health issues. I really admire the way that other artists have expressed some of those struggles through music. And I wanted to do some of that with OCD in particular.”
Formulating the project, Choeft wondered if an instrumental or song with lyrics would be the best form. He settled on theme and variations, a common structure in classical music where an idea, called the theme, is revealed at the start of the piece, then repeated with different flourishes. He titled the piece “Grumpy Brain,” the name his wife Amanda gave her husband’s OCD.
Performed on piano and flute, the composition begins relatively serenely before more and more shades of discomfort and chaos are layered on, pulling the listener into a place of unease. “I started with I guess the tamer sort of emotions associated with OCD and I progressed towards some of the more really extreme dark emotions that come from OCD as the piece goes on,” says Choeft. With “Grumpy Brain,” he doesn’t just tell people about OCD, he tries to show them.
“It felt like a wonderful outlet, not just composing it, but then also recording it and performing it, because it felt like a way to share [the challenges of OCD] with a broader audience and connect with other people who are going through similar challenges,” says Choeft. “That just felt like a huge, you know, relief is the wrong word, but it felt really important to do that.”
(@Kkisthat_youu) 
@Doechii 
