A journey through an emotional connection to music across different phases of life…
by: Kristen Martin
The first song I remember crying about was “Feed Jake” by an otherwise-unknown band called Pirates of the Mississippi. Looking at the lyrics today, it’s very grim, about a narrator who’s down on his luck and at peace with dying as long as somebody can take care of his dog: If I die before I wake / Feed Jake. Its slow, sorrowful country tune cracked my little eight-year-old heart. I desperately wanted Jake to be okay.
During my childhood in the pre-streaming days, listening to music was a hobby to which I dedicated time and attention. Music was a glue that bonded me to family and friends, and one of my earliest avenues for learning about life. I hung out in my room a lot with the radio on — sometimes just daydreaming, sometimes waiting for a favorite song to be played so I could record it on a mixtape. Although I had friends over regularly, I preferred being alone, when I could just sit and sink into the range of emotions sparked by the music. Over the years my tastes evolved through different genres, all of which helped me to cultivate that rich, but sometimes fraught, inner life.
Early on, bands like New Kids on the Block and Boyz II Men taught my malleable brain about romantic love. I learned that it was supposed to be deeply consuming, involve showers of roses, and occur only between beautiful people. In elementary school, I was still innocent enough to enjoy the theatricality of such songs. My friend Rachel and I made up interpretive dances, getting down on bended knee in her living room to beg our woman to come back. At the same time, I started developing real feelings for boys. I hung a poster of Boyz II Men in my room and stared longingly at whomever I thought was the handsome one, wondering what it was like to have a crush reciprocated. Songs like “I Swear” by All-4-One, with lyrics about undying love, preyed on my lonely, hormonal tween soul. For better or worse, ’til death do us part / I’ll love you with every beat of my heart. I cried whenever “I Swear” was played on the radio or by the DJ at the roller rink, inexplicably afraid that I would never experience love like that. I didn’t think I was one of the beautiful people who deserved romance.
In high school I got peripherally involved with a “rocker” crowd (teenagers couldn’t help labeling each other based on the kind of music they liked), although I didn’t fully belong with them or any other group. My Boyz II Men poster was replaced by pictures of Smashing Pumpkins, Third Eye Blind, and Alanis Morissette. I listened constantly to the alternative radio station, and got a Walkman so I could escape even deeper into my own angsty world. I lay in bed at night with Third Eye Blind’s “Motorcycle Drive-by” drifting through cheap foam-covered headphones, imagining that I could relate to the restless, unattainable girl on a motorcycle that Stephan Jenkins sang about: You smile and say the world, it doesn’t fit with you / I don’t believe you, you’re so serene / Careening through the universe / Your axis on a tilt, you’re guiltless and free. I couldn’t even drive a car yet, but I longed for things I couldn’t understand that were maybe the same kind of things motorcycle girl was chasing after. Was she merely running away from the possibility of love?
I, too, was alarmingly avoidant of affection. As much as I thought I wanted a boyfriend to care for me, I swiftly turned away any boys who showed interest. I wasn’t emotionally equipped to address the fear causing this behavior, so it just roiled, invisibly, deep inside and compounded my underlying depression. I found validation for my feelings in grungy and punky guitar riffs from Deftones, Green Day, and Smashing Pumpkins. Their lyrics mattered less than the fact that they were loud and angry.
My romantic and existential angst took a pause when I started college. I had a brand new life in a new town, with new friends, and I fell in love with a boy who loved me equally and treated me well. I’d brought my CD collection to the dorm, of course, along with a more compact boombox to fit the new millennium. (It was 2001, no more need for a tape deck.) For a while I listened to a lot of up-tempo music, like Weezer’s Blue Album and Cake’s entire catalog. My boyfriend and I took road trips together and listened to Tom Petty, The Beatles, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy.
He had his own angsty past as a skinny, nerdy teen, and shared with me the songs that made him cry: “The Freshmen” by the Verve Pipe, “Glycerine” by Bush, and “Romeo and Juliet” by Dire Straits. I let myself cry to those songs, too, because this was young love and I had erased the boundary between him and me. Juliet, when we made love you used to cry / You said I love you like the stars above, I’ll love you ‘til I die.
The relationship fell apart around the time Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head was released. I’d bought that CD right away because I loved the band’s first album, but unfortunately it became the melancholy soundtrack to a messy breakup. Thanks to a mental illness I hadn’t yet addressed, and didn’t really understand, I compulsively broke up and tried to get us back together several times. I saw myself in the plaintive track “Warning Sign”, which describes looking too hard for problems in a relationship: I missed the good part, then I realized / I started lookin’ and the bubble burst / I started lookin’ for excuses. And of course, “The Scientist” tore me apart: Nobody said it was easy / No one ever said it would be this hard / Oh, take me back to the start.
I started counseling and medication for depression. My ex-boyfriend and I remained friends, but I had trouble accepting that, even when he was clearly done with being strung along. Dire Straits said it best: When you gonna realize / It was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?
Eventually, he moved away and got a new girlfriend. I tried dating a couple other guys in our college town, but my heart remained stuck. One of my short-term boyfriends said I reminded him of a Regina Spektor song: I never loved nobody fully / Always one foot on the ground / And by protecting my heart truly / I got lost in the sounds. I knew he was right, but I hadn’t developed the emotional tools to dig my way out.
I made plans to relocate from Northern California to Portland, Oregon. My friend Jenny lived there, near the airport, and I spent a few nights at her apartment while looking for a job and a place of my own. I was scared of leaving my small college town and starting fresh. (Jenny was the only person I knew in Portland, and she wasn’t staying long-term.) The song “A Different City” by Modest Mouse clanged through my head, full of chaotic guitar noise, as I watched airplanes from her window: I wanna live in the city with no friends and family / I’m gonna look out the window of my color TV.
Things actually fell into place in my new city: job, apartment, friends, activities. But there were also more fraught relationships, more depressive episodes. At times, my sanity would crack in exactly the right spot for a particular song to arise from memory and insert itself on repeat. I’ve never had a habit of listening to Johnny Cash, but around the summer of 2009, his cover of “Hurt” became the earworm of my depression. And you could have it all / My empire of dirt / I will let you down / I will make you hurt. I must have subconsciously searched the music library in my head for “self loathing” and found a match in that song. Not coincidentally, this was after another awful breakup that I felt was my fault.
I grew out of my twenties, found a lasting relationship, and sat through a great deal of therapy. I let most of my CD collection go in a sidewalk sale before I moved in with my now-husband. By then I had adopted the iPod lifestyle, listening to downloaded MP3 tracks on long walks and bike rides. I still owned my music and kept it organized in a digital library. I tried to resist the streaming revolution, but eventually it swept me up, and a smartphone replaced the iPod. Now my music all comes from the cloud, but I try to keep my collection curated, and I use a service that pays artists a decent amount.
I’m still vulnerable to emotional earworms. After I gave birth to my son at 35, I spent the first few weeks in a dark fog, seeing no way out of the hellish exhaustion. We named our newborn boy Micah River, which unfortunately brought to mind “River” by Bishop Briggs, a song I barely liked but which got stuck in my head: Choke this love ‘til the veins start to shiver / One last breath ‘til the tears start to wither / Like a river, like a river / Shut your mouth and run me like a river. That chorus, especially the “like a river” part, rhymed with my son’s name and tortured my already-addled brain over and over again. Often in the middle of the night.
I was tormented again seven years later, when I had a serious bout of pneumonia that made me feel like death. I was confined to bed for weeks, feverish and feeble. The only song my brain wanted to play was Neil Young’s mournful “After the Gold Rush”: All in a dream, all in a dream / The loadin’ had begun / Flying Mother Nature’s silver seed / To a new home in the sun. It seemed to reflect the fear, in my most desperate moments, that my body might leave this Earth too soon.
In general, my emotional state no longer requires a soundtrack of angsty and morose music, like it did when I was growing up. I still love grungy and dark stuff, like early-2000s Modest Mouse, but I have branched out too. If “adult contemporary radio” is still a thing, you can be sure it includes some of the artists I’ve listened to lately: Brandi Carlile, Maggie Rogers, Feist, maybe Japanese Breakfast. Genre is irrelevant when it comes to emotional impact.
Still, music-listening is more of a passive activity than it used to be, so I tend to get caught off guard by strong emotional reactions. While working from home one day, a song from the newest Brandi Carlile album broke out from the background and punched me in the gut. “You Without Me” is a beautiful tribute to motherhood and letting go: Give me just a quick thumbs up / A wink before you go / I never heard that voice before today / I remind myself to breathe / There you are, it’s just you without me. Alone in the house, I had to pause and weep for a few minutes, suddenly imagining a future when my little boy no longer lives at home. I held a picture of his sweet seven-year-old face in my mind for a good long moment.
My parents must have taken a similar hit from The Chicks’ “Wide Open Spaces”, which came out a few years before I left for college: Who doesn’t know what I’m talkin’ about / Who’s never left home, who’s never struck out […] She needs wide open spaces / Room to make her big mistakes. That song made me feel excited and a little wistful when I was eighteen. It was nerve-wracking, in the best way, to head into that great wide open. I knew my parents had cried after they dropped me off at campus, and I thought that was kind of silly and overdramatic. Didn’t they know I was going to be fine? Now I realize that they were unsure how they were going to be fine after losing a piece of themselves.
Music can evolve in meaning over a lifetime. It helps us stitch together the stories of our existence: our struggles, our loves, and our hopes. We just have to take the time to listen.
Kristen Martin is a systems analyst by day and tries to engage her creative muscle by writing at night. She lives with her husband and son in Salem, Oregon. You can find her blogging about the introspective life at thisunquietmind.com.
