Tearwyrms: A Guest Playlist

ISSUE #110

[I like to keep Earwyrms open as a outlet where other writers and critics can submit their playlists and essays as well. This week's was written and curated by Ben Kasl, a writer and improviser living in Chicago. Thank god he took the subject of crying songs out of my hands and did it himself, as mine would start with "I Dreamed a Dream" and end with "Clair de Lune." His taste is much nicer.]

"When I really like something, I tend to never listen to it again. I want to remember the feeling even more than I want to remember the music. If you get that record back out, you risk learning that it’s not as good in reality as it is inside of you. Better to have the memory than to go back and have to adjust your truth. And even if it is every bit as good, you’re just going to deconstruct it, like this. You’re going to use your brain instead of your feelings. As you get older, feelings are hard to come by."

This is from Questlove’s now-deceased manager and producer Rich Nichols. Questlove included conversations between himself and Rich for his autobiography Mo' Meta Blues. I still think about this conversation about music and memory.

Music has become a utility, easy to take for granted. Listen to a song 1,000 times and you’ll forget that revisiting something — a memory, a fact, an outlook, a picture, an album — redefines it in your brain. Volatizing what your feelings were with the new ideas of who you are now. Leaving your feelings unrecognizable. Too much time and you’ll intellectualize away everything you ever cared about.

I have a codependency with music. Filling the silence, stunting my emotional growth for the sake of memories I refuse to let go of. Ossifying each track into an emotional tome stuck in the passive tense, heavy and warped with Meaning.

“There is my father, listening to his music hard enough to break his own heart. Trying to barrow shapes for his emotions so that he may hold them out to the world and the world might say yes, we see. We feel."

— Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

Playlists collage the feelings we once found in songs in the hopes that combined they will allow us to access those feelings again for someone else. If one song is blurred, re-contextualizing can always bring out what made it beautiful in the first place.

That being said, this is a collection of songs I have cried to:

— Some of these songs made me cry once, others gave me the permission to.
— One of them makes me cry for being blind to what I needed. Another for letting down people I love.
— One reminds me of my mom.
— I cried to one because I thought I should.
— For one, I was crying for circumstances I was afraid I’d never escape.
— I don’t know why I cried at the rest.

The one I think about most only made me cry after I saw the others who were crying, their faces strained and muted, contorted to match each solemn note. They were crying for the hope this song had given them, and how that hope was gone.

Feelings are hard to come by; I know these songs can’t help me anymore. Listening to them now only invokes a shadow of feeling. No tears, just the suspicion met with putting on an old jacket you loved, discovering it never fit.