Fear of Music

ISSUE #87

I've come down with a serious disease I call Break-Up Brain—the withdrawal we go through when we try to purge an addiction to a person. One (inconvenient) symptom is that I can't listen to music anymore. I can no longer take the emotional stimuli. As a music writer, it's distressing; as a lover of irony, it rules. I'm like a sober bartender, but less respectable and more bemusing.

Crying is like barfing: feels better to let it out, but if I can't stop doing it over the course of a few weeks, I start to think about the hospital. I do anything to keep it at bay for an hour or two. I have to be careful about what I hear and what I see, to shield myself from sensitive material. The blinders go up.

As with music, same goes with movies. It's hard to watch something knowing grief could be around any narrative turn—or worse, a depiction of wholesome love. I've found only a few movies that don't plunge me into misery:

• Ponyo (pure delight)

• Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace (hard to feel anything watching this one)

• Cats (helps to have no humans)

• Gone Girl (because things could be worse)

• Married to the Mob (Michelle Pfeiffer)

Watching those five over and over can usually fill the hours necessary to fall asleep again. Rinse, repeat.

With music, it's a game of chance. I can't choose what gets through and ends up helping. It's all discovery and surprise. The seeming randomness of it all is interesting to me. I've put together the only songs I've been able to listen to in the new year; they're connected only by that common bond. Some address the heartache, others just help me shut it all down. One is about addressing the captain. All of them are at risk of being ruined for me.

In the next few weeks, I think I'll be starting the 2020 Anniversary Project—collecting songs that turn fifty years old this year, then forty, then on down the line. They end up being fun snapshots of their times. What can I say, I'm horny for history!