How do we listen to songs?

I was just wondering…

While I studied for my exams last month, Agnes Obel’s Dorian was my favourite ‘sober up’ song. It got me in the mood to tackle the fundamentals of Constitutional Law and Human Rights when all I wanted to do was eat and fall asleep. I also listened the ‘Peaceful Indie Ambient’ playlist on Spotify every study session and I loved my routine. I fell in love with these songs, some more than others. Some so much that I got to know their names and added them to my personal playlists.

But now, almost a month after my last exam, things are different and I don’t feel the same way about these songs. This makes me sad and I find this strange; my sadness over songs that I don’t like as much anymore. It seems the songs stopped being important as soon as I wasn’t listening to them to help me study. Strangely, they now sound different and I feel weirdly nostalgic about the stressful period when I enjoyed listening to these songs. I don’t know what to listen to anymore and those songs were just really good. It’s hard to move on from that level of greatness. I probably listened to these songs so much that I grew sick of them. Whatever it is, I am mourning my lost love for these gems. Saddest of these gems is Childish Gambino’s Pop Thieves, which no longer makes me as happy and cheerful as it once did. This used to be my ultimate ‘feel good’ song and I am sad it no longer has the same effect on me.

While I acknowledge that this outburst of sad emotions might seem a little “over the top” for songs I don’t like as much as I once did, these are the things that fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how you choose to see it) plague my mind at 1:36am on a Thursday in the last week of February.