Comfort Music: A Playlist for a Wild World
Graphic by Grace McKean
As a student at the college not-so-affectionately dubbed “the place fun comes to die,” I know a thing or two about being in emotional distress. Three months out of the year temperatures are below zero, and from October to June my peers and I are bombarded with quantities of work beyond belief. We’re talking hundred-page reading assignments nightly, problem sets that take upwards of ten hours, and some of the worst grade deflation of any school in the country. To top it all off, we are all trying to figure out how to be working, professional adults during a global pandemic. At this point, I have accepted emotional distress as a constant.
Throughout these times that genuinely make me want to punch a hole through a wall, music is the thing that keeps me grounded. I think there is healing power in the fact that, while our relationship with music is constantly in flux as our tastes and emotions change, the music of our past stays there after we leave it. Music offers us a permanent mental scrapbook of our lives, sometimes bringing up good memories and sometimes bringing up things we’d rather leave in the past. By revisiting music that brought us comfort in the past, or that simply reminds us of better and calmer times, I have found that I can reclaim some of that positivity for my current self.
To keep it short, I think I peaked when I was six. This was the last time in my life I remember being truly, deeply happy. Thus, when I reach for comfort music, I automatically reach for the music my mom played for me then, especially Janis Joplin. Listening to the classic rock hits of my childhood immediately brings me back to easier days and lightens the emotional load of whatever I’m feeling. Even music that I didn’t listen to during those years but that has a nostalgic classic rock or blues sound offers this effect for me. I have recently done a deep dive into Mojave 3’s discography for this reason and highly recommend it. “Big Star Baby” makes me feel like I’m in my mom’s car going to get ice cream.
A great deal of my favorite memories were also made during my last two years of high school in the LA punk scene. At that time, Jurassic Shark and Deth Coast were regulars at the venues I frequented. Thus, not only these artists, but any artist with a sound adjacent to this scene is go-to for me when I’m feeling emotionally under the weather and need to hide away in the happier half of my memories for a little while. When I listen to these artists, I can imagine myself celebrating the start of the weekend and skateboarding along the beach. I can feel the warmth of the California summer and for a few minutes escape the bleakness of the Chicago winter and this university.
My favorite thing about revisiting music from my past is discovering new meanings within songs that did not originally resonate. Modern Baseball, Title Fight, Tigers Jaw, Turnover, and pretty much every band signed to Run For Cover Records in the mid-2010s were constants in my Spotify library. Now that I’m in college, around the age that many of these bands were when they wrote my favorite songs, I feel like I am better able to feel the emotional depths of their meanings. Yet, they are still familiar enough to be a sense of comfort.
Lastly, there is something inherently comforting about shoegaze, post-core, and dream pop to me. The warmth of heavily reverbed guitars mixed with melodic vocals feels like it cleanses the stress from my mind and body. The fuzz distortion common in post-core is just jagged enough to mirror the anxiety in my head and create an equilibrium with it. On a purely instrumental level, listening to bands like Balance and Composure, Superheaven, and LSD and the Search for God feel like a hug and a warm cup of tea.
Yet, these are just the artists and genres that are healing to me; this looks different for each and every person. Creating a playlist that makes you feel comforted and safe can be a priceless addition to your self-care toolbox. My advice in crafting it is simply to think about what music has offered you a sense of support in the past and what music makes you feel calm. Even on an individual level, this is going to look different day to day.