Music and Loss
giving up the songs we love to preserve our hearts
As I walked toward a makeshift altar in my parents’ backyard to the strains of Nick Cave’s “(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For” in 2002, I couldn’t imagine then that there would be a time when the song would signal heartbreak and despair, that, in fact, the whole of Cave’s catalog would become unusable to me, an artifact from a life I was trying to separate myself from.
This is the problem when you assign specific times in your life a soundtrack, when you attach songs and albums and artists to people and places and things. A storybook marriage gone awry takes with it all the romantic musical interludes when it dissolves. A broken friendship leaves a distaste for the songs you shared; memories of a car accident means letting go of the song that was playing when it happened.
I lost so much when that second marriage ended on several bad notes. The music we listened to - Nick Cave, Faith No More, Stabbing Westward - tied us together and bound us with memories that were soundtracked by these bands. As such, I could not bear to listen to them once the relationship was over. A void existed then, a dark hole where the pleasure of that music once lived, and I was careful not to step into that void lest I lose myself in it.
I resented that loss. I was angry that something I loved so much was in essence taken away from me. When my then husband and I parted, we had no shared property, no kids together, no money tying us to each other. We just had the music we loved and I gave him custody of that because I could no longer trust myself to take care of it.
Eventually I was able to ease that music back into my life, but there are still instances where it stings, where everything comes rushing back and I have to let it all go again. I’ll skip over the Nick Cave on my playlist on some days because I’m feeling vulnerable or sad and I’ll be reminded all over again at how much value I place on the music I listen to.
The absence in my life of music I used to listen to tells several stories. It’s not all about heartbreak and loss; sometimes we just grow out of the things we purport to love. Love of art is not always everlasting. What felt new and fresh to us at one point becomes stale. We age and let some of the artifacts of our youth go. For me, that means bands like Led Zeppelin and Van Halen no longer figure prominently in my daily listening. The music I listened to growing up is not what I want to hear now. It wasn’t a conscious decision to let it go, it sort of just faded from my life along with bell bottoms and painted denim jackets.
Maybe I just don’t want to be reminded of my long gone youth, the days sitting in a fort in someone’s backyard drinking warm, stolen beers and listening to “Dazed and Confused” like we were hearing the voice of god. They were good days, but they’re gone and to think about them too long means to think about my age and my mortality and who needs that. This is the trouble with peppering your life’s memories with music - it will invariably remind you of things you don’t want to be reminded of.
I wonder what music I will lose now, as I navigate new heartbreak amid a breakup of a fourteen year relationship. We had vastly different tastes and there’s no band that ties us together, but the music I’ve been listening to the past few months - Elliott Smith, The National, Wilco - surely in time will feel morose to me, it will become heavy baggage once I’m through the worst of it. I wonder if I’ll have to discard it, or just put it all away for a while, just another loss in a series of them.
I’m listening to my usual playlist as I write this and, as if on cue, shuffle hands me Nick Cave’s “The Ship Song.” It’s a beautiful tune and I leave it on, sing along with it because I can’t help it. The days when I turned away from his music are long gone, as is most of the hurt and angst of those earlier days. What was once lost is found again and I’m grateful to have it back.