I know what songs mean now

by Abby Clark

April 8, 2024

There’s a private playlist on my Spotify titled i know what songs mean now. It doesn’t automatically appear when I’m scrolling through my profile, so I need to actively remember it exists to find it. I had made it when I believed I reached a new emotional low (a personal best) after my first official breakup, therefore understanding the “real” heartbreak immortalized in the songs I loved for most of my life. The songs became a strange, nauseating soundtrack to one of the more tedious summers I’ve experienced. I remember experiencing sensations as though through a screen, confirming the current action just a few moments too late. I remember an endless exhaustion, trying to think of something to do and then realizing I was crying because there was nothing that I wanted to do, nothing that would make me feel settled. I remember driving to places I felt I needed to go to, talking to people and not knowing what to say. I remember realizing the feeling was more than a breakup; it was a feeling a year in the making. 

Sometimes I feel embarrassed about how unmoored I was. It’s so easy to judge, meditate on the silly, unreasonable, overemotional self I had been – because we are never as worthy of the sympathy we extend to others. And this tendency of mine to judge my younger self extends far into the past. How stupid it had been to pine over my best friend in middle school. Why did I listen to “Someday” by The Strokes on repeat – what did I know about loss at seventeen? 

The thought process is an obvious diminishment of the constant, unrelenting inner lives we all have. And it’s cruel. No human being is ever so simple, even when they’re seventeen, and at a certain point you have to admit this is true of yourself as well. I have a tendency to over-rationalize and compartmentalize (for years, the phrase “feel your feelings” made absolutely no sense to me,) and even as it was happening, I needed my depression to cohere into a storyline I could understand. When it didn’t, the feeling became my fault, an unnecessary, childish wrong, and the feeling folded in on itself. 

There’s a little playlist I can find when I remember it exists, as though looking through anthropological field notes, a pure distillation of a feeling and experience. I can feel myself back in a dim bedroom with the pale light seeping in, the stacking up of words in a journal then a transcription in a language I barely understand, identifying the feeling and hating the feeling. The songs have an immediacy to them that remembering myself as I had been simply doesn’t. There’s a potency to them that art might always have when it happens to you at just the right moment. And hearing it again, there you are, feeling lost and then ashamed of the loss, wanting to just stop mourning but not knowing how to stop. You can stand to look your younger self in the eyes and see clearly. You are feeling just as you did then, but you know that you’ll live. You see yourself clearly. There you are.

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Change by Big Thief

Would you stare forever at the sun? Never watch the moon rising?

It captured me after reading about Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek’s divorce. Listening to the song was almost a soothing exercise, I could listen to it while doing practically anything, and simply admire how subtly devastating a song could be. I listened as a casual observer to another’s pain that I had read about. Look at the craft, I said. 

It became an anthem, in its way, during the summertime. It was a manifestation that everything changes, and that was the main hope, I suppose. The possibility that you will be different can cow you in its immense implication. I have been fooled into believing that possibility is gone, through new yet consistent little screw-ups. “Change” acknowledges that just cannot be. Change will always come, no matter how you feel about it. Your relationships with other people will change, closer and then farther, and maybe even dissipating altogether. It’s something that I still mourn, that nothing will be the same. But change is the only opportunity as well, I think, to later see things the way they really are.

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Pressure to Party by Julia Jackson

I know I’ve locked myself in my room / But I’ll open up the door and try to love again soon

First heard when I was 18, I claimed “Pressure to Party” as my solitude anthem in the heights of quarantine. The driving pace of the guitar cemented its place in my canonical favorite songs, remaining there for years until it actually sunk in.

I came back to the song almost by accident, trying out some variety to straighten out my mood, when the line, “I don’t want anyone to ever take your place,” just about made me want to die. It felt so clear to me, the intense painful pleasure of wanting to stop time, at least for yourself, refusing to move forward an inch. Suddenly I knew a song that could explain the feeling I couldn’t put into words, of not wanting to move on from the loss. It was a thought that had almost made me feel pathetic, but when Jacklin sang it, I only understood it more. It had floated around in my stomach, shapeless and strange, but it became identifiable in a mere three minutes. It could point to where it hurt. 

But Jacklin doesn’t stay in the feeling. She opens up her door, or at least eventually will. This was the aspiration at the time, I think, of allowing yourself to let go of your hurt. I admire how this song makes the inaccessible suddenly within reach to grasp, to grasp and then let go.

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Night Shift by Lucy Dacus

Take back what you said / Can’t lose what you never had

Take back what you said / Can’t lose what you never had

I have a long history with “Night Shift.” I had long felt satisfaction in the high soaring notes of the chorus, a kind of ghost catharsis that I could feel for the singer. I watched Dacus sing it live with awe. I almost wished that someone could come and eviscerate me, just so I could understand the song. Though I have to say, once it made it onto the playlist, the feeling “Night Shift” captures wasn’t exactly right. It was angry, and I felt too flat, too stuck for angry. But there were specific verses that could bring me to tears at a given moment. Some of the anxieties about the start of the year, my real life, remained at the core of the song (The avoidance of “I’ll take the night shift,” as we all know)  The indifference of facing reality with your guts and all. Really listening through the song after having loved it for years seems to unsteady you, how an experience could be placed in such specific and honest terms.

The hope of the song, that in five years those songs will feel like covers, is a sentiment that I think about often. It’s recognizing the pain of the situation, losing it, yet recovering it in some distant way. “Night Shift” doesn’t exactly feel like a cover to me yet. I can still feel myself within it, but it’s okay.

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Alaska by Maggie Rogers

And I walked off you / And I walked off an old me

This is not a new song for anyone, and it was not really a revelation to me when I first listened to it. I was late to the song, as usual. But there was something to the pulsing rhythm of it, and of course Rogers’ incandescent voice that kept me listening on repeat through the end of springtime. At the time, I remember listening to the lyrics and thinking, Geez, this is kind of a sad song

It is a sad song. Extremely danceable, it’s still about loss: losing another person, losing yourself. Yet also gaining yourself back in the process. For a long time, I couldn’t tell what was different about myself, I only felt the itchy discomfort of not knowing. I wasn’t in the desolate landscape of Alaska, I didn’t really feel like I was anywhere. I missed feeling grounded, having a point of center. 

I choreographed a dance to this song later that year, I think to force a catharsis that by definition couldn’t be forced. I decided to not be in it, and the many, many times I had listened to the sounds and watched the movements, it seemed to find a pulse in my brain I could recognize. I did feel a release watching the dance for the last time. You become different, changed by experiences that seem to happen to you without your control, but you still remain yourself. It is lonely, I remember and know.

I still love the song. It helped me during a time when I didn’t know how to help myself. It looked me in the eyes and explained something to me–we keep moving forward, even if it doesn’t feel that way. I hear the song and I look back at that time with a weird nostalgia. Because I didn’t know it at the time, but things were changing. I feel such deep affection now for my younger self, who was lost but eventually learned to accept the feeling along with some help. She didn’t know it at the time, but she was in the process of becoming, never quite finding a shape, but trying nonetheless. We listen back and we keep trying.