Music is a Shortcut to My Life Force

On having music, losing music, and finding it again (aka hope, despair, hope)

Nov 07, 2024

My current, less swanky, stereo. Plus: the corner of my house that makes it look as if I live like a college student. I don’t.

The other morning, when my boxing coach asked what music I wanted to listen to I put on Tony Bennett’s Fly Me to the Moon. The lead up to the title phrase is plain, almost pedestrian (were it not for Tony’s voice!). “Christmas music,” my coach, in his early thirties, said, not dismissively. “Wait, wait,” I repeated, placing my hand over my heart which was pounding slightly in anticipation of what already lived in my cells. And then, there it was: Tony’s voice took flight. Raspy but pure, delicate but thunderous, all these decades later it never ceases to expand my very being.

Of course, we didn’t end up training to Tony Bennett. I knew we wouldn’t. We landed on Bowie. Or Blondie. Or Chappell Roan. Or maybe Shaboozey. There’s a lot to choose from these days.

For me, this delight in music is a homecoming.

Fifteen years ago, in the aftermath of head and brain injury, my nervous and endocrine systems blew. I was in debilitating, non-stop head pain (went to bed with it, woke up with it), stayed awake for three or four days straight and when I did manage sleep it was for two or three hours, everything was flipping and spinning, I was skyrocketingly sensitive to light and sound, my heart would not stop racing, I couldn’t find my way home from a block away, couldn’t follow conversations involving more than one person, narrated everything I was doing inside my head (“I am opening the door, I am walking across the room…”), and so much more. I was terrified beyond all description, so I won’t even try.

And in the throes of this, I lost my connection to music.

From the day I was born there were always two truths to my life: cats and music. I grew up listening to Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra -- and later Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen (I would soon learn it was impossible to rebel against my parents with music, because they liked all the good stuff, even The Sex Pistols).

By the time I was twelve or thirteen, I had a supersonic stereo that I knew how to break down and put back together even in the dark, the sort a record executive might own, bought with my own determinedly saved up money. I spent hours in record stores, mooning over new albums, running my hands over the smooth covers. At home, the sound of the needle hitting vinyl both calmed and ignited me like few other things did. My walls were plastered in band posters given to me by kind-hearted record shop clerks who took pity on me as I paced their aisles so often.

I spent half my youth sprawled across my bed, cats wrapped around me, headphones snug against my ears, the red dot of my amp’s power button bright first in the daylight and then the encroaching darkness and then the dark. Everything seemed possible then. My fledging spirit buoyed by these beats and sonorous swoops and arrangements of words. They lifted me; they plumped hollow pockets of my body I didn’t even know were hollow; they made me feel beautiful; they justified my anger; they nourished my sorrowful heart; they fortified my young, yearning soul. They made the world feel big and me feel brave. They gave me hope.

Exactly how they did this, defies language. But anyone who has been saved by music knows.

Starting at what, looking back, feels like far too young of an age, I went to near weekly concerts—Bowie, Blondie, The Clash, Springsteen (back in the small club days), Elton John, The Who (when Keith Moon was still alive), Elvis on New Year’s Eve, when he split his pants (my first concert, I was twelve), Fleetwood Mac, Patti Smith, Willie Nelson, The Jam, Roxy Music, The Allman Brothers and so many, many, many more—wriggled my way to the front of the stage and then afterwards, talked my way backstage. Then I’d rush home and write about it in a flurry in my journal.

So it was a natural progression when, in my thirties, I began interviewing musicians: Sinéad O’Connor (my favorite ever singer), Tony Bennett (one of the kindest, most generous humans I’ve ever met), Radiohead, Metallica, Mary J. Blige, Tricky, Richard Ashcroft (swoon) and so many more: all the musicians I loved, I got to hangout with. Only now I was invited backstage and rather than my journal I wrote about them for Interview and Vh-1 and other music outlets.

I also married a rock musician and often joined him on tour. Walking arm-in-arm into the back entrance of Wembley Arena whilst screaming fans hung off the gates put me in mind of being in a Beatles documentary. And I loved it.

I dragged my cats and stereo and boxes and boxes of albums and tapes and CDs from apartment to apartment (I seemed to move every two or three years during my decades in Manhattan), lugging them up five flights of stairs (I always ended up in top floor apartments). From the moment I woke, until bedtime, music played. My shield against a hard world. My celebration of a joyful world, a beautiful, hopeful world. My salve for a crushing world. It was also inspiration: I couldn’t write without it playing. Likewise, I couldn’t make love; couldn’t clean the house; couldn’t shower; couldn’t eat meals, couldn’t talk on the phone, couldn’t read a book without it. My cats groomed themselves in front of the vibrating speakers, as if bird songs were seeping through. My stereo was quiet only while I slept.

And then, in that aftermath of head and brain injury, my house fell into silence.

Everything that had nourished me, now overwhelmed me. I couldn’t handle the beats and rhythms and twangs. Clarence Clemons’ saxophone solo on Jungleland. The magnificent backup vocals on Gimme Shelter. Sinéad’s heart-piercing vocals, her lyrics on Three Babies (The face on you/The smell of you/Will always be with me). Everything Johnny Cash. It was all too much.

I wept at the loss of this sweet and wise companion, my most sustained and tender friendship. It felt like a death.

Periodically, I would try to return to times of old. I’d put on a beloved album, a kitty cat purring at my side, the hopeful crack of needle on vinyl. I’d load in five CDs, CDs I once listened to on repeat for days. My cells ignited! But three or four or five minutes in, I would have to shut it off.

There were a handful of promising stretches where I played an entire album. And then another album. And another. These lasted days, sometimes weeks. I felt the wonder and wild joy of my pre-injury days surge through me. I felt stronger, sassier, less afraid. “At last,” I thought, confidence coursing through me. “I’m back.” But then I’d slip into the quiet for months and months, even years. Over time, I filled the silence with NPR or eventually audiobooks. But I longed for my true love: music.

I sometimes felt I was doing something wrong. Unable to find comfort in the very activity that had sheltered me for decades, I wondered if I had brought this isolation on myself. Was I walling out the very songs that had once saved me, afraid of the memories and emotions they carried with them? Would I ever find that part of myself that was currently lost to me? That part that knew things – that really really deeply knew things – without knowing how or needing to know how. They just were. And the music proved it.

In my depleted state, was I afraid of my own longing. Of wanting. Of yearning. Of hope.

With the release of Lemonade, I experienced a shift. For one thing, Beyoncé’s glorious, healing voice sunk down-down-down into my bones, into the nucleus of every cell, into the dense, thumping center of each organ. The thrash of the guitars, the restless drums, the exquisite, unpolished anger, the tender hope. I shot awake. That lost part of me, remembered. And this time, she held steady for months and months of daily on-repeat Lemonade.

How do you describe the way music touches your essence? How it shapes and supports you? How it makes you feel whole? Why this song makes you ache with longing and that song means nothing? It’s outside the bounds of language. But when it’s happening, you know.

Over time, I slid back into NPR and audiobooks. And once more, I mourned my friend.

Then came Cowboy Carter, a wonder of a miracle album. Why it’s Beyoncé who helped me mend, I cannot say. But two things happened: A) Something irreversible shifted at my very core; and B) I first heard Shaboozey’s transcendent, gentle, gravelly voice — instantly, it grounded me. And thus began my months of a very insistent and very passionate Shaboozey obsession (just ask my friends). My Fault, which I played approximately 3,427 times the first day I heard it, captures what it feels like to watch a beloved harm themselves with drugs and alcohol. It soothed a broken part of me.

Hot on the heels of that came my likewise very insistent and very passionate Chappell Roan obsession (here, too, just ask my friends). Red Wine Supernova is a divinely perfect pop song. Her playfulness, intellect, wit, and downright adventurous glee lit me up; it brought me back to the frenetic hope and glory of my youth. And here, too: That voice.

Why these two musicians? I don’t know! But I’m grateful to them. They supercharged something that had been struggling to surge back to life in a lasting way. With them, the floodgates opened, the state of grace I’d once known in a sustained and enduring manner, returned. And my stereo stayed on.

Over the past fifteen years, there have been significant but plodding improvements with my health. My life has not been easy. Had my disconnect from music been a means to protect myself from too much passion, exhilaration, anger, joy, and hope? Had I been afraid of the fervor music stirred in me, that in my compromised state it would crush me? Or had the lack of music worn away at my already exhausted essence?

My dad and I rocking out, back in the day.

These days, my health is the best it’s been since the collapse. I still have a ways to go. But it seems more than a coincidence that music has, at last, returned to me in the same moment that my health is beginning to stabilize. Has the return of music allowed my health to thrive? Or has the stabilizing health, created space for music?

On Election Day, I once more boxed. This time there was no discussion of what to play: Beyoncé, full blast, with Freedom opening and closing the session. I was ebullient that morning. I could feel Kamala’s win in my bones. Could imagine Freedom rattling the speakers as she took the stage for her acceptance speech. It had already happened, we just had to catch up with it.

But instead, Freedom played for her concession speech.

I’m forever grateful I had that moment of celebrating Kamala’s win, even if it only happened between me, my coach, and Beyoncé.

Yesterday I drove my kitty to the vet for a checkup and on the way there and back we passed rows and rows of Harris/Walz signs and their beauty and their loss nearly broke me. But I am home now and have gathered my heart back to me as best I can.

America is clear to me now in a way it wasn’t quite before. The majority of voters voted for him. What’s already happened and what lies ahead, they want this. I feel strangely calm (amidst the sorrow and fear) in that manner simple truth, no matter how shocking or painful, can provide. How we’ll collectively move forward, how I personally will, I’m not yet sure. But the one thing I know is this time I’ll be accompanied by Tony, Sinéad, Beyoncé, Bruce, Chappell, Taylor, Van, Johnny, Alicia and all the rest. And all the ones out there I haven’t even heard of yet — but they’re waiting for me. They will remind me: I’m not alone. They will remind me: There is hope.

Kamala shared this adage during her concession speech: “Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”

May we all burn bright, friends.

xJane

If you enjoyed this essay, you may also like this one about inheriting the loneliness gene: