The Soundtrack to my Life: On the Songs I Can't Listen to Any More

No-one ever talks about the songs that are impossible - or close to impossible - to listen to, do they? Sounds like a boil I should be lancing on here.

Sometimes called the ‘Proust effect’ or a ‘Proustian rush’, a Proustian memory is an involuntary memory called to the surface of the psyche triggered by a sensory experience.

In his book À la recherche du temps perdu, the main character, who acts as a narrator for Marcel Proust himself, remembers a childhood moment triggered by the taste of a French Madeleine cake soaked in tea.

Proustian memories are most commonly associated with taste and smell, but they can apply to anything. If you’ve ever seen a picture of an old candy wrapper, crisp packet, or something else that might automatically transport you back to a specific time and place, then congratulations, you’ve experienced one.

Of course, music does this to you more than anything else. There isn't a television series or movie, for example, that I wouldn't watch again because of something that happened beyond me just not liking it. It’s largely a passive experience. The pictures are beamed out, and I absorb them.

But it's not the same with music. This is presumably because we interact with it in a different way to other forms of media. We dance to music. We have sex with it on in the background. We sing, often badly, for the benefits of both ourselves and other people. We see our loved ones off with it at their funerals. We gift it to each other through playlists or sending a song to loved one and saying, “I heard this, and thought of you”.

Music gets inside you, and in a way that nothing else really can. It feels like it flows through you, like blood. It's there at the best and worst moments of our lives, and to love music is to understand that to feel those highs, to really live them, you’re also at risk of feeling the lows as well. You don’t get to pick and choose.

Even though listening to music is in one sense a passive experience, it's also an active one for our brains. It can transport us to times, places and people that we'll never see again, and even this can happen in the strangest and unusual of ways. It can even remind us of people that we've never met and never will. It connects us and in a way that nothing else can truly replicate, like a ball of invisible string.

But this isn't always a good thing, of course. When we've been through pain and suffering, music will try to punctuate the silence. And precisely because it's such a personal experience, we accumulate a playlist of songs that we can't even listen to any more; or at least those that we have to steel ourselves for, bearing in mind that memories, moments and feelings will come flooding through our defences, whether we like it or not.

So, here is a list. These aren’t really songs ‘I can’t listen to any more.’ Well, one or two of them are, but I’m not going to tell you which ones here, am I? These are the songs that are, to say the very least, a difficult listen for me. These are the songs that I have to build up to, that I have to severely ration, or which have been spoiled, snatched away, or had their meaning fundamentally changed. They’re the songs which meant something to me once, but which aren’t allowed to let me feel that thing any more.

Ben Folds Five: Kate

I’ll start with the most straightforward of them all. I had a 14-year relationship with a Kate, and she was a fan of Ben Folds Five. And they had, several years before we even met each other, released a song called Kate.

She plays wipe out on the drums
The squirrels and the birds come
Gather around to sing the guitar

It is a lovely, beautiful, joyful song. She had an especially expressive dance for it whenever is came on the radio—imagine jazz hands, except it’s your entire body—and on the rare occasions that I have heard it since, that image has popped into my head and made me involuntarily both smile and laugh to myself.

When all words fail she speaks
Her mix tape's a masterpiece
Walks through the garden
So the roses can see

And you can see the daisies
In her footsteps
Dandelions, butterflies
I want to be Kate

But it’s her song. I feel as though she allowed me to live inside it, and I associate it too closely with her for it to feel comfortable for me to listen to often, even more than a decade on. As such, it’s been absent from my playlists in recent years.

And the obvious question at this point is whether, if I met someone else called Kate… would I start associating it with her? Could I? Because it’s a really good song. Is this a Pan-Kate song, or does it belong to this one specific Kate, and her only? I may or may not find out, some day.

This is a magnificent live version of it from 2001 (which is, ironically the same year me and her moved in together).

Nick Drake: Northern Sky

This is, again, not quite a song that I can no longer listen to, but a song with which I’ve had a deep personal relationship with for something like thirty years. In my early twenties, I would counterbalance the over-exertions of my weekends by detuning during the week. I would sit at my typewriter and bash out whatever was in my head. I would watch the television or read. I would listen to music.

But at 10, Mondays to Thursdays, the radio would go on for Mark Radcliffe and the Graveyard Shift. There was poetry, with Simon Armitage getting people to fax in their efforts in on a subject of his choosing. Mark Kermode came on and talked about cult movies. It’s how I came to see Les Yeux Sans Visage without being aware of that Billy Idol son. It felt like I was finally getting a pop-cultural education that I'd never really had before.

Mostly, the Graveyard Shift was about music. There were bands in session, sounding like they’d been recorded in a studio the exact size of the band-members. And there was, well, whatever the hell Radcliffe felt like playing, a mixture of the best alt music of the time with old stuff that I may never have heard before.

It's where I first heard Northern Sky, and it hit me hard. Produced by The Velvet Underground’s John Cale, it’s a watercolour of a song, broad brush strokes flicked across a canvas into which you can fill in your own detail. I was morbidly single at the time, so there was no-one that I could send it to, no-one I could share it with.

I never felt magic crazy as this
I never saw moons, knew the meaning of the sea
I never held emotion in the palm of my hand
Or felt sweet breezes in the top of a tree
But now you're here
Brighten my northern sky

There is an irony to this song, which is probably his best known (and certainly his most ‘commercial’) in that it finds Nick Drake at something like a point of approaching… happiness. Within five years, he’d be dead by his own hand. I never really realised it at the time, but about the time that this song came into my life was about the time that my full-blown depression was first starting to fester. And for all the softness and love contained in Northern Sky, it does carry the scent of the black dog.

It’s never been ‘our’ song for me and anyone. It possibly would have been the first dance at my wedding, but they didn’t have the facility for that at the venue. Instead, it’s a song that has rolled along besides me for years, picking up memories and associations with different people like a Katamari, a dense ball of black fluff, along the way. It’s a song that speaks to my inner melancholy, but it’s also one that I have to really ration, because it's essentially a photo album of the history of my sadnesses.

Mason Williams - Classical Gas

I love a playlist. Giving or receiving, I don’t care. And in the first flushes of love in the modern age, we can send mix-tapes to rival Kate’s at the touch of a button.

We were three or four months in, and no playlists had been sent, so we agreed that we’d do one at the same time-ish and send them over to each other. No rules, just a bunch of songs. We were firmly in the limerence phase, when the dopamine is flowing and it feels as though you may even have gotten it right, this time around.

I remember where I was at the exact moment that it happened. It was the middle of the afternoon, and I was washing up when I heard my phone buzz with a WhatsApp message. I could see it was a playlist, but I do like to be surprised (and had soapy fingers), so I set it playing without looking to see what was on it and got myself back to the sink.

Five seconds later, I let out a squawk. “CLASSICAL GAS!”, I exclaimed to no-one in particular, “BALLER MOVE!”

Because it was. Mason Williams’ 1968 baroque-classical-pop-easy-listening hit was more or less precisely the thing I’d least have expected to hear at the moment. It tapped into her sense of mischief, her sense of humour and the feeling of ‘prepare for the unexpected’ that came with being with her; this feeling that this enclosed life I’d been living could be replaced by a wide-open vista in which anything was possible. In that moment, I’d never felt so loved in my entire life. I’d love to hear that song and feel that feeling again, but that decision has been rather taken out of my hands.

I can’t listen to that song at the moment because there is only one person that I can think of when it plays, and that person chose to disappear from my life. I gave them the sole choice over whether they want to be back in mine in any way, and I hoped that they did, but I heard only silence ever again. And out with all of that, I guess, has to go Classical Gas, a piece of music that was in my life all too briefly.

(Though I should add that this televised performance of it is a gloriously bonkers as you’d hope it to be.)

The Hollies - He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother

We all need to carry people sometimes, and when it’s someone you love it doesn’t weigh a single ounce.

The story of how this song came about is extremely well-known. Two children, one carrying the other even though they were wearing leg braces on account of polio, were stopped and asked about carrying their sibling even though they were almost the same size, their response was, “he ain’t heavy, sir, he’s my brother”. The phrase later became the slogan for a children’s home in Nebraska, and was picked up as an idea for a song from there.

And this song hurts too much for me to bear, nowadays. I have carried and carried and carried, this last ten years or so, and the weight has always like felt next to nothing. But there have been times when I needed people to be there for me and it has never been repaid in kind. People have chosen not to do the work, where it involved my heart. They chose to run away or recoil instead.

On top of this, I have two boys of my own now and I know fully well the extent to which they would feel no weight if they had to carry each other. My job is to carry them both, and to make sure that they never do have to carry each other.

If I'm laden at all
I'm laden with sadness
That everyone's heart
Isn't filled with the gladness
Of love for one another

Simon & Garfunkel - Bridge Over Troubled Water

It is strange, how something that you never went to, something that you never could have been to, held for someone that you never knew and never could have known, can affect you so much.

I once heard about a funeral, a loved one’s mother. Her life had been touched by tragedy, and by its end her passing, although still premature, may even have been considered a release.

Bridge Over Troubled Water, I was told, was played at the funeral. “Not a dry eye in the house”, I was told.

When you're weary
Feeling small
When tears are in your eyes
I will dry them all
I'm on your side

This funeral was for a person who I’d never met and never would or could, but who I loved nevertheless because they’d brought somebody precious into the world. And I get it. This sort of behaviour sounds almost deviant. But this is just how I see the world. And now, many years from her passing, this guy that she never even knew existed wells up when this song gets to its final verse and chorus:

Sail on, silver girl
Sail on by
Your time has come to shine
All your dreams are on their way
See how they shine

Oh, if you need a friend
I'm sailing right behind
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will ease your mind

This really does just seem to be the way I’m built. And even though I know I don't have to apologise for it, I do sometimes feel as though I should apologise to at least myself for being like it, because it never seems to do me much good. And for I’m still grateful to this woman I never met, and always will be.

Rod Stewart - Maggie Mae

When a song catches you off-guard, it can be a most disruptive experience.

This brief story is also about a funeral. About two days before mum died, my sister was at her bedside at the East Surrey Hospital in Redhill. We weren’t even sure, for how long she’d even been in the final straits. Her eyesight had failed through macular degeneration, and it seemed very much as though her hearing had too, although this may have just been her shutting off the outside world. We’d made a formal request for a dementia diagnosis months earlier; it came through while she was in the hospital from which she would never emerge.

Mum was pretty much catatonic by then, but at one point on this particular day she sat bolt upright and said, "I've got a funeral to go to, and I expect to hear Maggie Mae played at it!”, and then went immediately back to sleep. They were, from what I could gather, pretty much her last lucid words.

I had seen her for the last time a couple of weeks earlier before being practically ordered to go on holiday by my sister. I knew it was coming and was uneasy about going away, so I asked for ten minutes on my own with mum. As she lay there catatonic, I told her that I loved her, and that I hoped that she was proud of me. I don’t know if she heard me. I choose to believe that she did.

So this is how we, probably more than a hundred or so of us, ended up listening to Rod the Mod warbling on about banging some older woman, or not being able to any more, or something like that. I’d read a eulogy in which I used the same logic on my fellow mourners as I had when explaining what had happened to my then four-year-old son. “When somebody holds you in their heart, you never truly die.”

I should be clear that I have no idea where this came from. My mum was not, to the best of my knowledge, a Rod Stewart fan. Indeed, the only album I ever recall her buying was a double-album vinyl compilation of Elvis 40 Greatest Hits which came in an arresting shade of neon pink. It’s what he would have wanted.

We’ll never know, just where this particular song came from to get into her head in the way that it did. Perhaps it was John Peel miming the mandolin when they performed it on Top of the Pops in 1971. But what I do know is that this song almost entirely changed its meaning in the space of about five minutes in September 2019, and that I’ll never be able to hear it in the same way again.

Sigur Ros - Hoppípolla

This one is the gut punch. This is the one that really hurt, the one that gave me the realisation that I lost so much more than a person.

I had plans for this song. It was the closing track of the first playlist I referred to above and it became, for me, the internal soundtrack to that relationship. It hit all the right pressure points within me. The fragility of the piano, the allusions to connecting to your inner child, the swell of hope that builds up throughout in its final stages. It felt aspirational, like a musical template for what I wanted my life to be.

I wanted this song forever. In the few spare moments during which I could indulge my fancies, I would daydream about it. I wanted it hanging in the air at every other joyous moment in my life. It would play as we walked along a sandy beach, looking out over an ocean that I’d never thought I’d get to see. Just as Going Places by Teenage Fanclub became the soundtrack to my inner monologue, so Hoppípolla became the soundtrack to that shared life.

I wanted it at my funeral. I wanted the final piece of music to be heard in my presence to be a tribute to the beauty that I’d found in my life and the gratitude that I’d had for it being there. A person, I could rationalise to myself on my death bed, had given themselves to me as I had to them, and that’s the sort of thing that makes an entire life worth living.

Perhaps I was just too ambitious. Perhaps I didn’t understand that other people can only really treat you as disposable. Perhaps I ultimately paid a price for honestly believing that I was finally getting what I deserved from life. Perhaps I was getting what I deserved through what actually ended up happening. But for a while, I really did feel as though I had it all.

I may never know such beauty again.

Please enjoy this incredible live performance of this song; it really is worth the seven minutes investment of your time. I’m afraid I’m not in a position to be able to, at the moment.

I listened to each of these songs in order to write this. Two of them made my face leak, and it wasn’t quite the two that I would have guessed, quite possibly because I still became so numbed by the experience that underpinned several of the rest of them.

Even in this confessional age, I feel nervous about publishing this. As I mentioned above, making myself vulnerable has exposed me to a level of emotional harm that I’ve never felt before. But I worked that out of my system. I already feel tougher and thicker-skinned, less likely to put up with anybody else’s bullshit.

But that’s the last I’ll say about any of that on here. Music should be a joy, and it’s given me a lot, over the years. So from here on, I’ll be talking about the pleasure it can give and the secret worlds that it can open up. And next time in this series, I’ll be talking about the instrument that I can play, the one that allows me to make sense of music in a way that stretches all the way into my heartbeat. It’s time to start talking about the songs and the music that I can still listen to.

Accompanying image by Frauke Riether from Pixabay