Music and Depression

Like a lot of people, I suffer with depression, although I dislike both the term suffer as well as depression. I prefer the more archaic word melancholy and I experience it more than suffer from it. I realize that depression is different for each individual, that it is more debilitating for some than others, but I also know how it seeps into your bones and floods your senses. For me it produces an intense sense of sorrow, of sadness, of longing for a kind of peace I'm never going to find.
I used to equate it with not fitting in or always being apart from what at the time I assumed regular life to be, but I no longer do. Loneliness, whether transitional or transformative, is always a companion and a part of me. It doesn't bother me as it once did; we are who we are however shaped.
I've also become more attuned to its comings and going, as when a state of melancholy is taking hold; there's an odd sense of revery prior to the funk that follows, and my means of dealing with it is music.

I'd like to say it makes the creative juices flow; it does not, it does the opposite, which is common with depression. No, what I do is embrace it and I listen to sad music.

I know how that sounds. I even have a playlist, SadLoveSongs.

Yet, oddly, I find it very comforting. Often it make me cry or weep, but there's a very human quality to sorrow, to sadness, to allowing than part of us to surface and express itself. Music for many people is an outlet for emotional expression, a well from which to draw succor when the world is weighted with anger and hatred and dissidence.
And for me it helps, it's almost magical in a bizarre kind of way; I don't become instantly better, these things linger, but I do feel connected; that, whether intended or not by the composer, I'm not alone, that there is this thing, this essence that brings me a sense of great joy even as the tears run down my face; that there is great beauty that will always be there when I need it. I draw a lot of comfort from that. It is an essential part of why I create music, that it may bring a kind of joy when needed.

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This week's song, is from Life Without Chickens, A Future Fireman.

Musically, the song is bright and sharp with a synth bass and a rhythm guitar over a simple drum beat. The vocals and lead guitar make up the rest of the instrumentation. Initially, it wasn't my intention to make the song as biting as it turned out, but I think that is due to the subject of the lyrics, which came last. They deal with the often conflicting way what we think we're going to be as children, whether as we or or parents see it, and where we actually find ourselves when we grow up. The other theme is the conflict between what we're told as children about our national myths versus how they are "amended" once we're old enough to handle the truth.

©2018 David William Pearce