On Repeat

Does this ever happen to you?

You stumble upon a track – in this case, a song randomly recommended by Spotify, which does seem to have the most uncannily accurate algorithms that know me all too well – and suddenly, your whole world shrinks down to a strangely sacred place, inhabited solely by your brain and that melody, those words, those soaring chords.

The track takes you to a place that only you understand, evoking emotions and triggering memories that combine to take you somewhere entirely new, somewhere indistinct, somewhere beyond the veil of this world, strangely beyond your grasp, shimmering in the semi-distance of your imagination.

You allow yourself to submerge in this ocean of sound, surrounded by its sensuality, at one and the same time gasping for breath as you plunge into the feelings released by the powerful current of notes and the pulse of percussion, and yet with your eyes wide with astounding clarity about what you must do.

Write.

Write like there is nothing else. Write with an astonishing speed and ferocity, as though your mission is to keep up with the tempo of the tune, to infuse your prose with the spirit of the music, to capture the power within that musical rapture and transfer it to the page as if nothing else in the universe has meaning.

It doesn’t matter what the artist originally intended to capture with their composition. What does matter is what it means to you, the angels and demons it releases within your own soul, the memories or future hopes and fears that fly free as you immerse yourself in the song.

And then the end of the track arrives too soon, in mid-flow of the words you are dashing onto the page in a state of near-frenzy, so you click that little symbol that enables you to loop that single track over and over and over again.

And again.

And again.

And that is how you find me, with this track in my head (Let It Go by the Ambientalist, link above.) It’s been there on and off for days, this afternoon and evening for hours, brainwashing me into creativity, torturing me to tease out the pain that I’ve been feeling about a failing relationship.

You might hate it, or be indifferent to it, or maybe, just maybe, you’ll catch a glimpse of what I’m experiencing as I’m listening to it.

Or perhaps I’m just an oddball, weirdly obsessive in my love of and sensibility to certain kinds of music, trapped by some strange sorcery in the song that has its hooks in me.

But, for me, it’s hard to describe how deeply therapeutic it is to be in the grip of a piece of music in this way, how incredibly cathartic it is to be so deeply moved to purge myself of what I’m feeling inside and splash it onto the page, whether with pen or pixels. Music as emetic, as much as music as muse.

How about you? Do you ever find yourself in the grip of a song and can’t let go? Or even, like me, welcome its embrace, almost to the point of being choked by it, as tears roll down your face and your voice is reduced to a sob?

Don’t try telling me that I need therapy. This is therapy – and I’ve had enough of the formal kind in recent years to know that you release your trauma however you can, as long as it’s in a safe way.

And I know the music will never hurt me. It understands my obsession, and keeps me in its whirlpool embrace, enraptured by its rhythms just long enough for me to exorcise my demons and free my angels.

All is well. At least, it will be.

Thanks for reading Henry’s Second String! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.