When Music Turns Against You

Nearly twenty years later, I’m still haunted by a radio interview with a musician whose name I’ve long forgotten. She wasn’t a star, but she’d carved out modest success as a songwriter and performer—until she stopped cold. Her lifelong depression had once been soothed by music, but eventually the very act of making it turned corrosive. What had been balm became poison. The emotions beneath her songs were too raw, too jagged to face. She not only put down her guitar; she banished all music from her life. While others found sweetness and solace in melody, she heard only torment. For her, silence was the only refuge. She spoke as someone exiled, barren, cut off from a source of joy she could never imagine welcoming back.

Most music, for me, carries happy and nostalgic weight. When a song pulls me back to a moment when I was unbearably lonely or making a fool of myself, I may wince—but I don’t hold the song responsible. Instead, I value it as a powerful marker, a bookmark that divides my life into bold chapters, each melody reminding me exactly where one ended and the next began.