And the Four Right Chords Can Make Me Cry
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: 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. I cried whenever “I Swear” came on the radio or got played 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 in with a “rocker” crowd (teenagers couldn’t help labeling each other based on the kind of music they liked), and my Boyz II Men poster was replaced by posters of Smashing Pumpkins and Third Eye Blind. Those angsty years were formative for my music taste. Life was not easy as a gangly, acned teen girl, and rock was cathartic. I had a growing CD collection and a Walkman that let me escape even deeper into my own world than just listening to a boombox. I would lie 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.
Maybe she was simply 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 turned away any guys who showed interest. This was an emotional conflict I wasn’t equipped to handle, so it joined forces with my underlying depression and roiled, invisibly, deep inside. I found validation for these 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.) I remember listening to a lot of feel-good music, like Weezer’s Blue Album. 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 album immediately because I loved the band’s first CD, but unfortunately it became the melancholy soundtrack to our breakup. Songs like “Amsterdam” did nothing to help my spiraling depression: I know I’m dead on the surface / But I am screamin’ underneath. Also, the breakup was messy on its own merits; 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.
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 my college town, but my heart wasn’t entirely available. 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 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.
At times, my sanity would crack in exactly the right spot for a particular song to arise from memory and insert itself on repeat.
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.
Emotional earworms have also been triggered at other heavy times in my life. After I had my baby at 35, I spent the first few weeks in a dark fog, seeing no way out of the exhaustion. We gave our newborn boy the middle name 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, tortured my already-addled brain over and over again. I didn’t feel that kind of torment again until I fell sick with pneumonia last month, and replayed Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” in my head while confined to my bedroom: 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. That dreamy, mournful tune mirrored my fevered state, from which I wasn’t sure I would recover. (I recovered.)
I let most of my CD collection go in a sidewalk sale circa 2014, and donated the rest to Goodwill, save for a few special ones, although I have no mechanism to play them anymore. Music-listening remained an active hobby through my Zune/Creative Zen Micro/iPod years, as those tactile little rectangles traveled with me on long walks and bike rides. I tried to resist replacing my iPod with a smartphone, but the convenience of the phone eventually won out. Gone was my definitive music collection; in came algorithms. I used Spotify for years to discover and keep up with new-to-me music, but its recommendations became humdrum and too heavily influenced by AI. Now I use the streaming platform Qobuz, which seems to be run by actual music lovers and reportedly pays artists better than most services. I know there are ways to return to an approximation of the way music used to be enjoyed, but admittedly, they require more effort than I’m willing to expend.
I’ve found satisfaction lately in rebuilding my “record collection” in the cloud, even though I don’t actually own the contents, and choosing albums to listen to from start to finish without pushy algorithms. In general, my emotional state no longer requires a soundtrack of angsty and morose music. Life is good. However, certain songs can still catch me off guard, like when I was listening to Brandi Carlile’s latest album last week. I’d already heard the track “You Without Me”, but this time the lyrics about one’s child growing up punched me in the heart: 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. I was alone in the house and had to pause my work 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. There is so much I understand now that I couldn’t before. Music can stitch it all together, if I just take the time to listen.