As I was waiting in the lobby of a venue, post-show, a woman came up to me. She was crying, and something about me — my face, my height, my aloneness — must’ve looked open.
“That was amazing,” she sniffed, leaning down to me. “I can’t believe I cried.” She chuckled, a little choked. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“She gets you sometimes,” I said. “She didn’t get me this time, but I’ve definitely cried at her shows before.”
It was an intimate, stripped-down performance by one of my favorite musicians. I’d enjoyed it, of course. More respected it.
But something on this new album didn’t click with me: even when it was rendered simple, acoustic, small. Despite the rave reviews. The previous album hadn’t struck me either.
I was missing something.
I knew, after this smaller show, that it had nothing to do with fame or popularity or the size of the room.
I had been awed, once. What happened?
In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer wrote: “Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?”
From middle school through early adulthood, I sought whatever song scratched down my spine. I pocketed Bright Eyes and Elliott Smith and The National and Mitski and Sufjan Stevens and Julien Baker and Frightened Rabbit. My playlists were sad, sad, sad. And they didn’t make me sad, necessarily, but I sat with them. And they held me.
It’s not that every song was a balm. It was more a resonance in the writing, vocals, and music; an alignment between their expression and my inclination. You know when art immediately feels real to you: the stop-in-your-tracks painting spotted in a museum gallery.
When the musicians we loved most fall out from under us, when their work no longer holds us, what does that mean? “Growing apart” feels a little too parasocial (and we should all sideline ourselves more in these discussions — the art’s not about us). But people and their tastes and paths diverge, and that’s nobody’s fault.
But it’s not, either, like every musician I’ve loved had the same or even vaguely similar circumstances to my own. It’s emotional content, mainly, that drew me.
The long-favorite musicians, maybe, aren’t as sad as they were? Or perhaps that confidence they’ve gained in their art over five, 10, 15 years let them shed something I craved when they were a little bit greener.
Maybe I’m not as sad as I was, or music no longer hits that sore spot that once so desired to be known. The old songs do feel the same, but that could be nostalgia.
“When you hear a song you have a real emotional connection to, there’s data showing that your brain’s reward system is engaged. You get a release of neurotransmitters which are associated with winning a real prize, so there’s an element of the enjoyment that you’d get from something physical like gambling or recreational drugs,” Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at UCL, told VICE. “But, crucially, you only get this response through music you like.”
That article is referring to musical anhedonia: 3-5% of the population purportedly derive no joy from listening to music at all. Their “reward systems” could be activated, just not by songs.
So when it comes to music, the lack of reward system means any relatability goes missing. The sadness of a song is gone — it can’t touch you — but the joy of understanding and knowing that sadness is, too. There’s nothing to sit in, to surround yourself with.
That’s the emptiness I’ve found worrying: an inability to hear what’s so touching about the newest record.
The Foer quote ends, “You can’t protect yourself from sadness without also protecting yourself from happiness.”
I’d been to one of those small-small shows — the type newer fans dream about. 200 people cramped into a record store/coffee shop/hookah lounge, half-circled around the somewhat-stage. I stood on my boyfriend’s shoes to see better.
I was three rows back, and she was there with us.
Every cut felt raw. In my memory, I’m sure I cried.
Every crooning vocal stretched out and up into the low ceilings, and I urgently peered over a number of silhouetted shoulders. No one spoke; no one yelled, “we love you.” But the moment felt so important, so essential, that I’ve composed it in my mind like a short story, an idyllic scene.
Again: it’s not that musicians get too big, too known. It’s not about craving that small roomy; it’s not saying “true fans” should get certain tickets.
It’s about craving that excitement, about the anticipation you’ll be greeted with the very best version of what you love.
Being in the room, when you need that room, feels so right.
It’s just hard to know that the room is gone, and you cannot be yourself, as you were, in that room, as it was, ever again.