On My Sadness And Its Musical Antidotes
I don’t know what sadness means exactly. The word I mean. The feeling I’m all too familiar with…
Damien Rice was my first education in this emotion: his first album, ‘O’, would get played on repeat in my Mother’s car on the way to school around the time I was turning 11 years old.
(Perhaps I didn’t have much of a normal childhood after all)
Point being that I always really loved his ‘sad’ songs! ‘Cold water’, ‘Eskimo’, ‘Delicate’, ‘Cheers Darlin’…
I listened to them a thousand times at least, later on into my teenage years also, with my best friend Tebz. We were both a little too ‘popular’ at school to probably be seen listening to Damien, but somehow we were always able to pull it off.
A question that arises: Does listening to sad music act as a (natural) medicine for that difficult feeling of sadness? Or is it that that term ‘medicine’ (or ‘healing’) is not quite doing the emotion justice?
Damien Rice: still one of my favourite musicians of all time, and a great teacher for me throughout my teenages years…
For me, the sadness I feel when singing along to Billie Elish, James Blake, Adele or other sad-songsters doesn’t feel like an ailment or ‘problem’ at all! It feels like a celebration, truly; like I’m just where I need to be - the right place at the right time.
Of course, when I’m running to fast 180bpm electro-pop tunes it’s the same thing: right place, right music, right time.
I might not be making much of a STATEMENT here but somehow it’s magical to find the right vibration for my mood, and to remind myself that always, actually, life gives us the opportunity to be held, embraced, even celebrated for who we are in each moment.
Hippy terminology aside, let’s think about it for a moment: Would a living being’s life (or let’s call it ‘nature’) be designed to suffer, in the cruelest, saddest, most tragic sense of the word? Could that emotion we call ‘sadness’ be deliberate (and seemingly unavoidable) poison, injected into us from time to time as just ‘part of life’ that we must deal with?
I don’t think so…
As the great Haruki Murakami once said: “Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional”.
Human emotions might indeed be ‘inevitable’, but our experience, and the story we make, of them is largely upto us.
Sometimes I sing and play the guitar. Sometimes I walk and listen to music. Sometimes I run, call with family and friends, write (obviously), roll around on a hard floor, cry. Sometimes it does feel a bit like suffering, but (thankfully) most of the time it’s a rather (extra)ordinary part of my day.
We are a little in danger here of ending on some generic idea of ‘self-acceptance’ or ‘being in the NOW’ or ‘embracing each moment AS IT IS’. So let’s finish with a lyric of Damien Rice’s instead:
“Cold… cold water… surrounds me now… and all… i’ve got… is your hand”
To always have another’s hand is quite something, is it not?
Thank you for reminding us, Mr Rice, of our options: if you’re still feeling susceptible to your own sadness after reading this, then you can always try ‘reaching out your hand’.
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