In my 20s I wallowed in heartbreak to David Gray’s ‘This Year’s Love’. At a funeral last year it was played as the exit music. I was a mess. When we listen to sorrowful music, the brain releases prolactin (the hormone that soothes after distress), oxytocin (which creates connection), and dopamine (which prepares us for emotional release). Music literally elicits the chemicals of emotional regulation.
Music is where we store the feelings we can’t carry alone. Life asks us to let go again and again, to soften into change, to hold contradictory emotions at once. It gives us structure vast enough to contain it all – longing, hope, memory, yearning, joy, heartbreak – without collapsing under the weight. It becomes the cabinet for our tenderness, the vessel for everything too vast for language.
And so we choose the songs that undo us – not because we enjoy grief, but because music transforms grief into meaning, distance into closeness, and feeling into something we can finally bear. A devastating piece of music is not tearing us apart. It is stitching something back together. This is why we return to these songs. Not because we seek sadness, but because music transmutes sadness into connection, and connection into something resembling touch.
Massage music usually indicates spa style watery pan pipe stuff. It took me a long time to find music that wasn’t too upbeat, or too depressing. Most of my playlists are based on Zero 7. I can think of three people who prefer me not to play music. Often nature is more relaxing and less distracting. But when someone comments that they haven’t noticed there was music on, that is the goal. It hasn’t created an unwanted emotional response. It has become what I intended it to be – background music.
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