The Complicated Relationship Between Music & Grief
It’s not the songs; it’s your brain’s reaction to the songs
Music has power. I’ve never played an instrument and I can’t hold a tune to save my life, but count me among the legions who rely on music to loan me words I’m unable to muster on my own. And once experienced, who can forget the moment of transcendence when strangers at a concert or sing-along synchronize to the same musical beat, lifted into emotional harmony?
But I’ve learned that the power of music hits different for a person in mourning. When I lost my son to suicide, music became a dreamy, sacred ribbon that linked my spirit to his. If grief is an expression of love, doesn’t that mean love songs are grief songs? “Here, There, and Everywhere” by the Beatles and “I’ll Be Seeing You” by Billie Holiday equally evoke the hazy glow of infatuation and the misty searching of grief. When you love someone, you want to see, hear, and feel them, whether they’re alive or dead, and music can enable those sensations.
For mourners, sometimes the musical connection cuts too deep, evoking specific memories too overwhelming to face. Other times, songs are that good kind of pain, the laugh-through-tears existential chaos that grievers navigate regularly. And sometimes, music curdles into irrepressible, relentless earworms.
Almost everyone experiences earworms, the sensation of a song playing on repeat in your head, a cognitive itch that demands scratching. Earworms are the lifeblood of pop music, advertising jingles, and children’s songs because they work. Merely typing the letters b-a-b-y s-h-a-r-k sends our brains into a vortex of unshakable sounds, and attempts to release ourselves of “The Macarena” or “Kars 4 Kids” produce a psychological histamine that causes the stuck song to burrow even deeper. And in my darkest months of mourning, earworms plagued me.
The grieving brain is like a computer stuck on a computation, frantically spinning, seeking purchase on anything that might help solve the biggest problem of all: how can my loved one be gone? Which is why, for almost a year after my son died, my broken brain clamped down onto anything with a melody and refused to detach.
The few notes from the audio brand that flashes at the end of a TV show, like the sound that reverberates behind the Netflix logo? Two beats, over and over and over. Orchestral scores that augment movies, especially sweeping dramas like “The Natural” or “Out of Africa,” trapped me with their swooning violins and horns. The worst, by far, were the classic rock anthems that are the soundtrack of seemingly every advertising campaign that runs during college sporting events. No song could be unheard.
Music was everywhere. The surround-sound of cherry-picked lyrics, familiar melodies, and iconic guitar riffs harassed me, painting the inside of my head with irritation so intense I rubbed my temples and even caught myself pulling my hair. But avoiding and muting music wasn’t enough, because while most of the earworms that clanged through my cranium become lodged there when my overactive mind reached for music and pulled it in, some earworms self-germinated, coming from within me, not from the TV or radio or sound system. The words were very specific, maddeningly on-the-nose representations of my condition: “You Had a Bad Day.” “Forever Young.” “No One is to Blame.”
My therapist explained that “stuck song syndrome” is a sign of a brain trying and failing to solve a problem. It made sense, because I really couldn’t understand anything about the new reality that stretched before me without my youngest child. So earworms piled onto the trauma of this loss, literally driving me out of my mind.
Then bless my therapist, who suggested running lo-fi music in the background when I worked or read. Lo-fi rarely includes the hooks that torment me. I can’t say I actually like lo-fi, which comes packaged in ethereal and cringy names like “Floating Island,” “Into the Fog,” and “Cozy Cuddles.” But it works. It’s calming and soothing without being distracting. Most importantly, it tugs my mind away from the incessant, looping earworms. I can even listen to the radio, most of the time, anyway.
