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A letter of thanks to the songs you marry that break your heart
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by Amber McGown-Rules
Do we fall so deeply, immovably in love with musicians because they collect the pieces of their own shattered hearts and craft them into a precious, articulate song that finally expresses the things you felt a deep-rooted need to say?
You know how you can listen to a song and it makes you swell with emotion and you know you're alive? There's a lump in your throat, and you're disoriented from the beauty and pain and rawness, but you're so uplifted that someone feels that way, even if it is the saddest thing you've ever read.
I don't know why it is that this type of song makes me feel better. I don't know why I get a strange comfort from knowing someone else suffered a broken heart. Everyone has had a broken heart, right? So it's a bit pathetic that it makes me happy that someone else was sad enough to write about it.
I think it's jealousy. I can't write to save myself when I'm emotional - I can't imagine collecting the pieces of a shattered heart and crafting them into a precious, articulate song. Are humans happy to hear this sort of thing because they can relate to it, or because they don't want to be the only one it happened to?
Are musicians so revered because they put how we feel into words so eloquently that we can scream it at the top of our lungs? Without having to think about it ourselves? As we drive down a freeway, ex-boyfriend's books and loveletters being flung vengefully out the window as we go?
Or are they revered because they are saying to us, so honestly, that hey... it happened to me too. Fuck it.
It's like a conversation with a friend, only because songs are so open to interpretation, your friend tells you their heartbreak and lets you fill in the details for them. It's self-indulgence at dangerous levels. I wonder... is this why teenagers can fall so deeply, immovably in love with musicians? In fact, they develop crushes that are sustained for a life time, mostly unbeknownst to everyone else... I know every time I hear an INXS song, as much as they bore me now, I get a warm glow of nostalgia and a bizarre pang of possessiveness. Nobody liked them as much as I did when I was 12. Nobody.
I want to give thanks to all those songs... the ones that remind me of heartbreaker boys, or a government I feel powerless to fix, or a step-parent who hit me too hard, or a scorching day spent lying on the grass wondering what adulthood would bring.
Thank you for the music...
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About the author
Max Macbride is lost in music. He's caught in a trap. There's no turning back! A recent foreign-language business graduate, he aims to make the world a better place through a combination of financial astuteness and nu-skool flamenco. He would also like to be dressed as a small bear.
