i've been thinking about how stupidly powerful music is lately
not even in the dramatic "this song ACTUALLY saved my life omg" way
i mean in the much dumber way where i'll be having a completely normal day, put one song on and suddenly my entire mood has been replaced by whatever some random person decided to put into a microphone 20 years ago
which is honestly fucking insane
you can be completely fine and then spotify decides to shuffle into something depressing and suddenly you're staring out of a window like you've just been informed your husband died at sea
nothing even really happened
you literally just heard a guitar
obviously everybody already knows that music affects your mood
fast music can make you feel more energetic, slower music can calm you down, loud music can make you feel excited or angry, sad music can make you sad, etc etc
groundbreaking bullshit
but i think the more interesting part is that it works the other way too
your mood changes the music you actually want to listen to
and i think that's where it kinda gets weird
because if you're already sad, you're probably not gonna put on the happiest song you can find
you're gonna put on something that sounds exactly like how you currently feel
which sounds completely counterproductive
"i feel awful, i should find some music that makes me feel considerably worse"
great plan bro!
but for some reason, it actually feels good
i think part of it is just wanting something to match what's going on in your head
sometimes when you're upset, listening to something happy is almost annoying
it feels completely disconnected from you
meanwhile if you put on something miserable and it perfectly matches how you're feeling, it almost feels comforting
not because you're suddenly happier
just because something else kinda like gets it
which sounds really corny but i genuinely think that's a massive reason why people get so attached to particular songs
it's not necessarily that the song itself is unbelievably good
sometimes you just heard it at exactly the right point in your life
and now your brain has permanently glued the 2 things together
this is also why nostalgia through music is genuinely evil
i can hear a song that i haven't listened to in years and suddenly remember insanely specific things that i had completely forgotten existed
- a room
- a person
- a game i was playing
- what the weather was like
- some random discord server i was in
and then for the next 4 minutes my brain is basically living in 2022 again
which is probably why old music can feel so much stronger than new music
you're not only listening to the song anymore
you're actually listening to everything that happened around it
and sometimes that makes songs age really weirdly
something you absolutely loved can become completely unlistenable because it got attached to a bad memory
or something you didn't even care about that much at the time becomes one of your favorite songs years later because you miss when you used to hear it
the actual audio file has not changed at all
you, on the other hand, have
and therefore, the song basically did too
i also think people underestimate how much what they're listening to all day affects them
if you spend 3 hours straight listening to miserable music, you're probably not gonna come out of it feeling exactly the same as when you started
same thing with really aggressive music
or calm music
or whatever the fuck else
i'm not saying putting radiohead on automatically gives you depression obviously
that would be an absolutely incredible medical discovery
but your environment affects how you feel and music is part of your environment
except unlike most of your environment, you're deliberately choosing it
which makes playlists kinda funny when you think abt it
they're basically emotional presets
you have the playlist for when you're happy
the playlist for when you're sad
the playlist for walking around at night feeling mysterious for absolutely zero reason
the playlist for when somebody very mildly inconveniences you and you need to act like you're going through the worst breakup in recorded history
and somehow they actually work
i can put on certain playlists and pretty much know what mood i'm going to end up in
which probably means i should make better decisions about which ones i open at 2am while i'm already going through a pretty bad breakup
i will not be doing this
but i probably should
the strangest part to me though is that none of this really feels forced while it's happening
you don't usually notice your mood slowly changing because of what you're listening to
you zone out and suddenly realize you've spent the past 40 minutes feeling weirdly upset and you're 7 songs into an album where every track sounds like the world is ending and they're all named something like "everyone i love is slowly becoming a memory"
and then you wonder why
well mystery solved i guess
music isn't just background noise
it's basically constantly interacting with whatever you're already feeling
sometimes it amplifies it
sometimes it changes it
sometimes it makes you remember something you hadn't thought about in years
and sometimes it completely ruins your otherwise perfectly normal afternoon
which is probably part of why i love it so much
there aren't many things that can change how you feel that quickly without you really even noticing
and there definitely aren't many where you willingly replay the same song over and over again