Songs that Saved you/Kept you sane/meant a lot to you

[Spence]

On 1/10/2020 at 2:27 PM, Hermit said:

was Luka by Vega

 

I am not a big "music" person.  By that I mean I I usually just have the radio on in the background. 

But Vega is one artist that has stood out from the noise for me.  To the extent I actually took the effort to figure out her name.  Tom's Diner is one of my favorites by her. 

 

 

[Cancer]

I had only one episode where I used music for sanity maintenance, sort of.

 

My last year of grad school kind of went wonko.  Just like everyone else at the university, I'd been supported on university money for an improperly long time.  Everyone (including the honchos of the departments who paid their students) ignored that rule, and nothing had ever came of it.  Until ... the university finally got the software fixed to connect the machine that said how long a student had been there with the machine that said if they were on the payroll, two systems which had never before talked to each other because they belonged to two separate offices.  But then they did talk to each other.  And since the rule had always been in place, it wasn't a rule change with any chance of being grandfather-claused in. So ... I had my funding cut off on New Year's, 1986.  I had about a month's notice that this would happen.

 

About three weeks before New Years, Congress enacted the Gramm-Rudman Deficit Reduction Act, which was the first of the omnibus across-the-board horizontal-cut federal funding reductions.  Because that was the first of these things, no one knew what it meant, and lots of things were held back or made up on the fly.  The National Science Foundation's Astronomy Directorate, not knowing if they were going to get the money in their budget for the purpose, shelved their postdoc program for the year.  Now, I didn't think I was going to get one of those anyway, but that program was one of the leading job sources for freshly minted astronomy PhDs, and suddenly, that year, that dried up.  Which means all the people "sexy" enough (i.e. working on topics that were Teh Coolness that year) who ordinarily would get direct NSF funding instead got pushed down into the less monolithic, scattered and random postdoc job market.

 

This junction of badness ... the need to get finished ASAP, but very poor employment prospects over the timeframe that implied, was bad enough.  Then at the end of January, on what was a otherwise glorious sunny day both in Florida and in Austin, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after leaving the pad.  This again hit the whole astronomy racket hard; not only were seven astronauts killed, but at that time the well-over-budget and already-delayed Hubble Space Telescope was supposed to be launched in a Shuttle the following September, and now that was on indefinite standby.  That cast a few shadows over another big employer, on top of the serious demoralization it dealt to the whole community.

 

For these perfectly rational reasons, I battled depression the next few months.  I had already put everything else in life on hold.  I'd gone over to a fourteen-hour-day schedule, getting up about noon, going to the department to interact with advisor, librarians, bureaucrats, etc., as needed, going back home to eat, then back to campus to work on the thesis until 3 or 4 AM.  First thing I did on waking each day was an emotional inventory to see if I could function that day.  It was ten or twelve days between times when the answer to that was "no".

 

I was willing and able (time-wise) to lose one day at a time to that, but I wasn't willing to lose two.  Now, the previous summer, before my roommate had finished and lit out for his own postdoc, he'd made a 90-minute cassette for me (largely according to my specifications) which we called the "Hope/Despair tape", because one side was full of songs we associated with negatives and the other with more inspirational things.  I used this for active mood manipulation: I'd listen to the despair side, trying to push myself all the way down, bounce off that bottom, and then use the hope side to provide an extra shove upward so that I'd be able to work the next day.  Make no mistake: I understood what depression was, I understood that I was not doing the right things to recover from it, and I understood I was disregarding some on-campus resources that were intended to help students recover from it.  I did not care about those.  My thinking was that the problem would go away as soon as I finished the thesis and had a real job, and those other options consumed time that I desperately needed to solve the root problem.  So, from January through May, I stayed home as needed about three times a month, did drudgery in my apartment -- what better circumstances to clean your kitchen? -- and listened to the tape. 

 

The tape wore out over a decade ago (having lasted that invaluable several month episode plus a few years), and since not everything on it was something I had selected, I can't recall everything on it, though I'd recognize it if I heard it again (unlikely, since a lot of it was obscure even at the time).  It should be in a drawer in my basement somewhere, but I haven't gone looking for it since my cassette deck died shortly into this century.

 

I do remember the Despair side included

• Kindness (At the End) by Renaissance, one of the most bombastic yet most final breakup songs ever
• Let Her Go Down by Steeleye Span, which is *not* about oral sex
• Five Miles Out by Mike Oldfield (because my interpretation of that song's last few seconds is ... No, they don't make it)
• and it closed with Mist, by Mannheim Steamroller.

That last requires a bit of explanation, since only a few people associate that with utter desolation like I do.  There had been an anti-alcoholism public service ad on the Austin TV channels where that had been the background music; the ad ended with the end of Mist and a real fade-to-black that will always be a "and now I lay me down to die" vision for me.

 

The Hope side included

• Working at the Car Wash Blues by Jim Croce (which opened the side: a resolution to escape, albeit with no vision of how as yet)
• Wonderful Land by Mike Oldfield
• Hi-De-Ho as covered by Blood, Sweat, and Tears ("Lay it on, children")
• the 4:16 of Vangelis's Heaven & Hell that isn't about the Inferno
• Realization, by Pat Moraz, with which that side closed

And all I can say is: it worked.  I lost a minimum number of workdays.  I got the thesis done, defending on the last Tuesday of May.  Less than two weeks after that, I got a second phone call from a professor at Indiana (who passed away last April, coincidentally) offering me a postdoc there.  He'd called me up a few weeks before that about the postdoc.  As I found out after the fact, the thing that nailed down that job for me was my response in that phone interview to one of his first questions; that sentence was, "Yes, I defend next Tuesday."  The tape had got me through in the irreducible amount of time I'd needed. The depression has never come back. 

[Badger]

Didn't really listen to music in high school when things were most dark.

 

Closest thing for memorable to me would be Garbage "Only Happy When It Rains" when I was in college.

 

 

[Greywind]

 

Can't hear it without thinking about my brother.