Coping with anxiety and depression
At the start of this year, I interviewed Adam Granduciel of the War on Drugs. We talked about his album Lost in the Dream, and the depression he had faced making it. He didn’t seem like a bundle of laughs that day, but not many people do when they’ve flown across the Atlantic to do several days of promotion. Months later, a piece appeared in Pitchfork that described his state of mind on that trip to Europe: “The thought of dying on the plane had crossed his mind more than once.” The thing is, I was in exactly the same state of mind as Granduciel at the time; suffering badly from a combination of anxiety and depression that had my wife convinced she’d come home from work one day to find I had refused to leave the house and was never intending to do so again. I was barely sleeping, and in the brief couple of hours each night when exhaustion would get the better of my state of mind, Isabel would report that my slumber was punctuated with mutterings of horror and despair.
In those early months of the year, when pretty much the only thing I could concentrate on was my desperate desire to be put into a coma so I wouldn’t have to think about anything for some long and indefinite period, Lost in the Dream brought me comfort: it sounded like a blanket to envelop myself in; it made an aural promise to me that however dark life seemed, there was the faintest possibility the sun might return. Reading the Pitchfork piece, I thought back on our encounter, and how absurd it seemed that two men who both make their livings from trying to communicate should spend an hour not really talking about the single thing that was evidently consuming them both at the time. How very buttoned up.
Eventually I sought treatment, and anti-depressants returned me to a sort of equilibrium. They also, I think, have flattened my emotional response to music. But I remember listening to Lost in the Dream, and how it could bring me to the brink of tears – and, to be honest, I’m glad I’m no longer that person. Michael Hann
Nursing my newborn son back to health
I’ve spent the last two and a half years listening to Arthur Lee – not the late figurehead of the great Los Angeles psychedelic band Love, but my son of the same name, who was born in summer 2012 by emergency Caesarian section. It turned out that he was caught up in his umbilical cord, and if the surgeon hadn’t acted instantly, we’d have lost him. There was more trauma when we discovered that Arthur is allergic to food, which has meant a long battle trying to get him to accept a formula drink that tastes like glue.
We reached a turning point last year when we discovered Arthur can eat carrots: from then on, everything improved. On Christmas Eve, 2013, Arthur decided to walk and then at the start of this year gave me the most emotional moment I’ve had as a father, when he suddenly danced to music. The song wasn’t by Love – or, as I’d have preferred, something by the Fall – it was Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, on a CD of children’s lullabies. I hadn’t paid much attention to this ancient tune since I was Arthur’s age, but the grin that spread across his face as he turned slowly round and round was magical.
I’ve since become as absorbed in the song as he is. Who knew, for instance, that the lyrics are about a guiding light of hope amid the darkness? Or that the version we know was arranged by Mozart? Now, every time I hear it, I picture my beautiful and much healthier little boy rotating on his size two shoes. It was a moment that reminded me that you never know when or where music’s transformative power will strike you – and Arthur’s beaming smile told me that he was happy, so things would be OK. Dave Simpson
Going through a breakup, part 1
As anyone who has gone through a breakup knows, the Alicia Keys song Try Sleeping With a Broken Heart is the cry-yourself-hoarse standard. This year, I lived a version called Try Drinking Three Pints of Wine at a St Vincent Show. I was on the cusp of my own broken heart, in that limbo of knowing your lover is about to leave, and still in a murky denial, one that won’t let you take control and exit the situation with dignity. My best friend insisted I stop moping and wondering and took me out to the Camden Roundhouse on a mission of distraction.
I was quiet and unsettled; he ignored that entirely and bought us a bottle of white wine. You can’t take glass into the auditorium there. That night I discovered that half a bottle pours snugly into a plastic pint pot. I’d seen St Vincent a handful of times, but, warmed by drink, the performance took on a new urgency. The studies all say that the best way to get over sadness is to listen to sad songs and let the grief take you over completely. Sometimes angry songs are better. She played Actor Out of Work, from her second record. It’s loud and stroppy and I felt the lyrics buzz through me, carried by the wine: “You’re a boxer in the ring with brass knuckles underneath…” It was perfect. I wasn’t glum, I was mad. The relief could have knocked me over. Two more pints. She threw herself around the stage and into the crowd; the lights flared and popped.
We wobbled to the pub, happy, where we talked about pop music, and I felt normal again for the first time in weeks. I found out then that Robyn sings on Britney’s best song, Piece of Me, and I’ve played it a lot since, content, listening for her parts. What a revelation. I got dumped a few days later. I’m alright about it now. Rebecca Nicholson
Patching things up with Chris Brown
Most ordinary people worry about the health of their relatives or the misdirection of their lives, so it’s a bit troubling that I spent an inappropriate amount of 2014 concerned for a millionaire woman-beater who resembles a toddler with a God complex – namely Chris Brown, and his performance on the hit single Loyal in particular. It’s become one of Brown’s definitive smashes, spending 36 weeks on the US Billboard Top 100 – and tens of hours on repeat in my kitchen. Initially it was because it’s coldly gorgeous: producer Nic Nac plots a grid of perfectly placed depth charges and rifle fire, across which multitracked vocals drift like drone exhaust. Lyrically though, it’s as obnoxious as Brown’s public persona, a tale of infidelity where he “just got rich / took a broke nigga bitch”.
When I was half deranged after the 25th play in a row, this song had me thinking about Brown’s life more than those of my closest friends. I started reading his whole biography into it: here is the R&B boy who wants to be a thug, the loverman who ruins intimacy with distrust. “She wanna see a nigga trapping/ She wanna fuck all the rappers,” he raps, his voice as dead as a clap in a concrete cell. To my ears this is the year’s most heartstopping couplet – at the very moment he’s announcing his sexual invulnerability, he gazes jealously outward at the ranks of alpha males who will surely outstrip him.
Following months of constant listening, Loyal has gone from a diverting R&B track to a psychodramatic masterpiece. In a 2014 ruled by manufactured outrage, cultural debate was mostly binary, with responses being either Best. Song. Ever. or Ban This Sick Filth. Loyal reminded me of the power of dissonance: there’s beauty in ugliness, and a fascination in things we despise. Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Jamming with Judas Priest
I wasn’t expecting to have a moment of musical epiphany at the Judas Priest Rock’n’Roll Fantasy Superstar Band Camp in Las Vegas. I was expecting to find it hilarious, not least because Judas Priest’s record label seemed so nervous about my being there, asking for reassurance that my ensuing feature would be about the band, rather than the concept of people spending thousands of dollars to jam with bassist Ian Hill and drummer Scott Travis. Perhaps the whole enterprise was going to be richly, entertainingly excruciating.
Rock’n’Roll Fantasy Superstar Band Camp turned out to be a squat building on what looked like an industrial estate. At least one of the assembled campers was exactly the kind of person you would expect to splash thousands of dollars on jamming with a famous metal band in Vegas: an awful, blowhard self-made-millionaire type, who seemed incapable of communicating at any volume lower than a hectoring bellow. But most of them weren’t like that at all. They were ordinary people who’d clearly saved and saved to be here, because they loved Judas Priest so much, because their music had changed their lives. One woman told me she was a cancer survivor. Screaming For Vengeance and British Steel had apparently got her through chemo: this was her treat to herself for still being alive. Another was a kid who looked about 15 and seemed to have won a competition; one perhaps to find the most archetypal looking 15-year-old metalhead in the world.
The band got onstage and played Judas Priest’s improbable cover of Joan Baez’s Diamonds and Rust. The cancer survivor was, frankly, a bit pitchy, the guy on drums was audibly struggling to keep up, but the world’s most archetypal teenage metalhead was an amazing guitarist. “He shreds,” nodded the middle-aged woman sitting next to me, who looked like 80s metal pin-up Lita Ford: perhaps because, as I later discovered, she was 80s metal pin-up Lita Ford. But it didn’t matter how they sounded. It was how they all looked that struck me: eyes closed, transported, almost beatific, even the blowhard self-made-millionaire. There was, I was slightly astonished to note, something really moving about watching them. It was like a cartoon representation of how your favourite music can make you feel, that transcendent moment when it lifts you out of everyday life and takes you somewhere else, somewhere infinitely better.
I wouldn’t pay thousands of dollars to jam with Judas Priest’s rhythm section – or anyone else for that matter – but I thought I knew exactly how they felt. Then the song ended to a smattering of applause and life went back to normal. Alexis Petridis
Going through a breakup, part 2
I only started to appreciate sentimental songs again this summer. Sure, it sounds a bit tiny violins, but the number of times I’ve welled up to or at music since then is get-a-grip embarrassing. It wasn’t that I was deaf to songs with words in them before; I had just switched off the part of me that responded to anything that might hit where it hurts. I favoured complex rhythms and challenging structures. I liked noise, lots of noise. I wanted music that moved my feet, not my heart. But then I broke up with the boyfriend I had had throughout my 20s. He moved out and took all the kitchen utensils, so I lived on takeaway pizza for a month. I snivelled at the simple chuggy comfort of Caribou’s Can’t Do Without You and its sweet refrain that I wanted to pull on like a fleecy onesie.
It was so abrupt that it shocked me into life and forced me to face the feelings I’d ignored because our relationship had been stuck. I cried at the Nick Cave documentary 20,000 Days on Earth, during the band’s studio performance of Give Us a Kiss, which was so intimate you could hear Cave’s lips parting. And I full-on boo-hooed when I first heard LA singer Banks’s debut album, Goddess. I identified with the longing and uncertainty she felt in Waiting Game, and even though the evocative titular track offered obvious platitudes about being a brilliant woman, I found it empowering. It was as if Banks had written the diary that I’d always been too afraid to write. She vocalised that it’s hard to be real when it’s uncool to feel. And when I don’t want to feel anything anymore? Well, I have Tinder for that. Kate Hutchinson.
Sitting weeping in a car in California
This year was a strange year. The weeks seem blurred and indistinct to me now, though I remember the glimmers of it: Brazil, Bridgwater, Santa Fé; mimosa blossom, Heart of Gold, the sound of choughs on a warm Welsh morning.
I have not often chosen to write about my personal life in my journalistic career; rarely do I imagine readers’ lives enriched by such detail and mundanity. But sometimes it seems impossible to write of anything else, and the loss of a child is a deep and particular grief; a root that spreads beneath all of the days of a year and leaves them unearthed.
For a long time I do not look at it. I cannot speak of it. It sits in the dark place beneath deadlines and social events, gigs, emails, interviews, telephone calls, airports. It lies under all happinesses and the bright days of summer.
But I am driving along the coast of California when my iPod suddenly plays a song that I love and I find myself so buckled by sadness that I have to pull up abruptly on a slim, worn curve of road and cry. Terrible Love is the opening track from the National’s 2010 album High Violet – though it is an acoustic version that plays today, and in its looser and more ragged feel I find a kind of kinship. This is a song that has seen me through many sad times, hard times, hollow times. It is a bulwark of my record collection, a song about a relationship soured — the curdled air and claustrophobia, the quiet fear and fury. In its final verses it builds to a catharsis, a gathering of guitar, brass, keys, and then sets loose its final line: “It takes an ocean not to break.”
I sit in the front seat, with the windows down, and listen to it over and over. It is autumn, but still warm, and the sea is thrashing below, giddy and oblivious. I feel like a wild thing – crying and singing, crying and singing, until my face is swollen, and my throat is raw. “It takes an ocean not to break,” the stereo roars. “It takes an ocean not to break.”
And from that quiet curve of Pacific road I feel I am flinging all of the year’s hope and love towards the water, heaving my grief from its dark depths, until there is nothing, nothing nothing; nothing but music and air. Laura Barton
Listening to Pharrell (over and over again)
Said through the gritted teeth of a maudlin Radiohead fan, Pharrell’s Happy has been less of a moment and more of a constant. I’ve dragged it through 2014 like a toddler’s blankie, its omnipresence throwing a massive cliched sunbeam over my life.
It was there on the way into work during the bitter storms of February; when I was sofa surfing after a breakup and hauling a huge bag of my belongings on the Central Line at rush hour every day for a month, it distracted me from the hatred of fellow passengers. It enhanced feelings of total joy, too, as a sea of yellow balloons fell from the ceiling at the end of the Brit awards, as it blasted out of crackling car speakers on the winding roads of Sicily in the middle of a scorched September afternoon; it soundtracked the rose tinted madness of love and the endless romcom I’ve apparently stepped into.
Of course, I am not alone in my dependence on Happy – 500m YouTube views and 260m Spotify streams in 2014 suggest it’s something of a global phenomenon, but I can’t recall feeling so emotionally indebted to Eiffel 65’s Blue (Da Ba Dee). Unlike other hit singles, its brilliance feels intrinsic – I’m no neuroscientist, but I believe there is something in the song’s harmonies that trigger a chemical reaction in my brain, not to mention the strange endorphins its plucky electric piano, gospel hand laps, and Pharrell’s Curtis Mayfield falsetto spark. As I dodged its creators’ big hats and hyperbole – Pharrell’s 24-hour video, his tear-soaked Oprah interviews, statements such as “dance like no one’s watching, smile like love” – I allowed Happy to evolve into a song that was as musically brilliant as it was emotionally essential. Just don’t tell Thom. Harriet Gibsone
Hitting China’s karaoke scene
No right-thinking person’s musical moment of the year should involve me singing. Having said that, by the time I stumbled into the karaoke venue opposite Red Live House in Changsha, China, during the late stages of a booze-blurred October night, I was about as far removed from “right thinking” as you’re likely to get. I’m not talking about the alcohol that my wonderful hosts from the Changsha Morning Post Weekly had been plying me with all night. It was more the sheer sense of disorientation I felt at having spent four days in a city 5,600 miles from home – the heady cocktail of fresh sounds, surreal dining and strange smells.
It was in this wobbly emotional context that I treated a bunch of Changsha locals to my own unique interpretation of Sam Cooke’s A Change Is Gonna Come – not perhaps the vision Cooke had in mind when he penned his stirring Civil Rights anthem, but one whose sheer passion I’m sure the legendary soul singer would have liked. It was following my rendition that I had a moment of clarity and realised that every other person in the room had unbelievably good voices – not just my musician friend Sam Genders of Diagrams (his artist’s residency in Changsha was the reason I was there), but also every Chinese person I’d met that night. Then this clarity disappeared with another round of whiskys and I returned to do the same disservice to Taylor Swift and the Beatles. As the Changsha crowd chimed in with backing vocals, Sam and myself returned the favour by yelling along to the songs they picked – songs we’d never heard before in our lives but were a huge deal in China. All of which goes to prove: no matter where you are in the world, karaoke is a language we can all speak. Tim Jonze
