Music is guidance to the soul and heart. Finding what type of music sparks feelings within helps create a definition of who you are. Various emotions that come from the art of music can speak for themselves. The sheer amount of strength and strain from a voice in a song makes you understand or feel the emotions expressed by the artist. Finding your own complicated feelings within an artist’s music helps provide the emotional needs that you struggle to find.
People experience loss and love throughout their lives. Peers and friends always enter relationships with each other, romantic or not. People whom I know, who have been in relationships that don’t end well or are messy, had music help guide their process of emotional grief.
For example, Tyler Bishop (12) said that after a breakup, he listened to “Cigarettes” by Starfall. Bishop said that the song he listened to after the breakup, “gets me in my feels.” Bishop had later gotten over the breakup and said that he had listened to “Loyal (feat. Lil Wayne & Tyga)” by Chris Brown; he had listened to music to change himself into the man that he is today.
Another senior, Cypress Pulkkinen, has also gone through a breakup. Pulkkinen said that his song of choice was “Why Did I Choose You (Alternative Vocal Version)” by Marvin Gaye. His recovery song was “Lifestyle” by HXG, which was to help him “get back in that mode.” Pulkkinen is now in his healing era and listening to “Awkward” by SZA. He said that the music “put me in a certain mind space to where I could finally think about the options and decisions I was choosing…it kind of opened my mind to different possibilities of anything that I could do.”
Although music is a helpful guide to your mood, Bishop quotes that it’s also important not to “let the music influence your mood, because if you keep listening to sad sh*t, you’re gonna stay sad… eventually you just get over it, and start bumping some bangers and get some higher tempo.”
Emotions that come from listening to music are natural, although it’s important to acknowledge that music shouldn’t decide the choices that you make. People take heavy emotions differently with music; some people can listen to punk and ska or some people can listen to R&B after an emotional loss. It just depends on the type of person they are and the choices that they personally make musically.
