I downloaded a few new CDs last night – Glee’s latest, Sarah McLachlan’s new one which I’ve been waiting for some time to get my hands on, although strangely now that I have it, I’ve been afraid to listen to it. It’s there, as though it implies something, this listening to it. My iTunes has been a mess for a while courtesy of a corruption during a download and much of the music hasn’t been working. I spent some time with it last night and while driving in this morning I had the radio on, the music on high. And I thought about things.
Music has always been troublesome for me. I was told an interesting theory by a therapist and that is that people whose lives have been traumatic often have adverse affects from music. One study asked children who grew up in angry, hateful homes to choose some music to relax to. One teenage girl chose the most thrashing heavy metal imaginable, real thrasher basher stuff that makes eardrums bleed and speakers explode. The research showed that those with fast and furious lives and thoughts could choose fast and furious music, because it was the background noise that they knew.
I don’t know what that teenager’s background was or how similar or dissimilar it is to my own, but I know that I have always had negative effects from heavy music. Fast music additionally would grate on me, anything like hard rock or heavy metal or rap would just exacerbate an already overactive embrace of anger. I may not have had fast music as my comfort zone but anger, well…anger I knew.
To that end slow music is my bag. Calm music, soothing music, music that can drift into the back of the mind and stay there, music that can’t control or hold or drive or cling, but just be. I think it’s why I’ve always loved Sarah McLachlan, she comes in through the ear and drifts around the back of the head just there, yes just right there, and you’re set. As a person so historically prone to inner rage, anything with a tempo above a heartbeat could ignite me. I couldn’t even listen to faster music, I needed slow stuff. Happy music was for people who could be happy, not people who could be me. I even have a playlist on my iPod called “Happy” which is full of stuff that I never play but which could charm a Care Bear. What’s most listened to on my iPod is a playlist called “S’s list”, which is full of what Alastair calls “kill yourself music”.
I was driving in this morning and on the radio came a fast, up-tempo song. I turned it up and started to sing along. As I waited my turn at the roundabout, I realized something: I haven’t played my “S’s list” for some time. I haven’t played my “Happy” playlist either, but the last time I clicked on to “S’s list” I found it a bit depressing, a bit maudlin. I found it made me sad. I found I didn’t want to be sad. I found, for the first time in my life, that there’s a difference between being me and being sad. Throughout my life I haven’t had the bitter, violent, angry music because I found more in common with the dark, I found more in common with the bleak. For many years if someone were to ask me what song I would identify with the most, it would without doubt be Sia’s “Breathe Me”. The first line says it all: Help, I have done it again. The stanza “Ouch I have lost myself again/Lost myself and I am nowhere to be found/Yeah I think that I might break/I’ve lost myself again and I feel unsafe” was the story of my life, it was my own self-imposed definition.
After years of therapy, after heartaches and fuck-ups and regrets, I don’t have to impose that anymore. I’m no fool – life isn’t always easy and it isn’t always going to be. I’m not completely fixed and I’m maybe not going to ever be. I don’t have sorrow as a constant companion because I don’t need it. I don’t have self-loathing and awkwardness as my guide and my life anymore because it doesn’t need to be here. I’m not perfect – I look at myself in the mirror and don’t like what I see. Of the 10 kilos that I lost last year I’ve gained back 3 and I find I want to lose them and more, even though I know that takes me back to a state of scrawny. There’s fixed and then there’s Fixed, and I am maybe not yet the latter.
But I am allowed introspection without despair. I can laugh and not be full of myself if I do so. I can have music and laughter even if it’s got tinges of bittersweet sometimes. I can listen to Sia’s “Breathe Me” and love it as a piece of music and a piece of who I was and have been.
And I can put the iPod in my ears and turn on Sarah McLachlan’s new album and I can dance like a monkey to The Maverick’s “Dance the Night Away” because the single greatest thing therapy has taught me is that life is too short to be so sad.
-S.
Years ago a super therapist inroduced me to a new,to me, concept re: music. He had me read and listen to music by Stephen Halpern. Halpern did his PhD effects of music. Wrote book “Sound Rx”. Great music. Album I liked best was Spectrum Suite.
Seems the effect music had may be linked to the normal brain wave patterns – i.e. where the beat falls- either in sync or out of sync.
Believe it or not, one of my favorite soothing CDs is Jewel’s lullabyes that I first heard on your blog with the song Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. I was mesmerized and finally found it in a local store. I still play it all the time in my car and love it. Thank you!!!
Glad you are able to enjoy the upbeat music now. I also identify with music and found that the songs I most loved when things were so bad a year or so ago are now kind of sad and depressing. So, the play list is being redone and filled with some more upbeat stuff. :-)
My choices of music are entirely dependent on my mood at any given time. I have happy, sad, angry, depressed, pensive, calm, reflective, exuberant, or just good old kick out the jams motherfuckers categories with my music. I may be thrashing on the way to work with vintage Iron Maiden but just quietly chillin’ on the way home with Poco. Or on one of my trips home from Arkansas to Georgia listening to Nirvana in Mississippi but changing over to Jackson Browne once I hit the Alabama state line. I’ve even found times when a little country ain’t so bad to listen to *gasp*. The bottom line is, everything I listen to has a purpose with me, particularly at any given moment.
Never thought about music in that sense. Having said that, as a young adult/teen, the song I always identified with was “What About Me” by Moving Pictures:
And now I’m standing on the corner, all the world’s gone home
Nobody’s changed, nobody’s been saved
And I’m feeling cold and alone
I guess I’m lucky, I smile a lot
But sometimes I wish for more than I’ve got…
Now when I hear it-or even reading the lyrics-I find it whiny and annoying. I’m so over it.
when I got to the “kill yourself music” line, I snorted diet Mt. Dew through my nose. Too funny. My husband calls my eerily similar music choices “the suicidal tendencies station” or if it is my more upbeat and unrecognizable to him music as “homicidal tendencies station”.
When I was in college and got dumped by my boyfriend, I made a tape (why yes, I am old) which I called Songs for the Suicidally Depressed. I later made a few more versions. What was good about these was that when I was sad, they suited my mood. When I was angry, they suited my mood. When I was happy, they were HILARIOUS! But then, I have never taken myself very seriously.
Now that I am older, I am less tolerant of new music, and everything sounds derivative. But music doesn’t influence my mood…my music choices are determined by my mood.
For years, probably about 11 (when I first heard it) to 16, the song I identified with most was Simple Plan’s “I’m Just A Kid.” Saying that now, I have the urge to throw a defensive “DON’T JUDGE ME!” in here with that admission, because like Teresa, I am so. over. it.
“What the fuck is wrong with me?
Don’t fit in with anybody
How did this happen to me?
Wide awake I’m bored and I can’t fall asleep
And every night is the worst night ever
I’m just a kid and life is a nightmare
I’m just a kid, I know that its not fair
Nobody cares, cause I’m alone and the world is (having more fun than me)
Nobody wants to be alone in the world.”
I don’t really identify with a particular song anymore, but I do know that my ipod is full of songs from the same phase as listening to Simple Plan, bands like Sugarcult and Panic at the Disco, Fall Out Boy and Linkin Park and Good Charlotte, and I find myself increasingly unable to listen to them. I would never delete them from my ipod, though (I have a problem ‘shutting doors’, and what if I wanted to listen to them again?)
While in the past the songs I chose to listen to have been ALL about the lyrics, I find I am actively searching out songs with beautiful melodies, songs I enjoy singing along to (I’m atrocious but in the car, turned up loud, who’s going to hear you?) I don’t know what that says about me. A lot of the songs with beautiful melodies are also slower and sadder, but often with an optimistic tinge — at any rate, far more optimistic than I used to listen to.