Musical Memories: The healing power of music

Music, in all different forms, has helped me cope with mental health struggles throughout my entire life. 

By Oliver Robbins

Trigger warning: this piece covers topics of mental health that may be triggering for some

When I’m in a stressful situation or I’m having a low day, an easy fix for me is to just breathe and listen to music (Image Courtesy of priyana)

Music has a unique ability to connect you with artists you have never met who are writing songs about experiences or feelings similar to your own. It can allow you to escape from your low feelings, or unhealthy situations and become closer with people in your life. For me, music in all different forms has helped me overcome my mental health struggles throughout my entire life. I don’t remember a time when music wasn’t what I turned to during my low points.

Being stuck in a very toxic home environment during the COVID-19 lockdown in 2020 and not being able to be with the people who helped me escape from this environment previously, was extremely difficult for me. Most days, I wouldn’t get out of bed, I would barely eat, and I didn’t have enough energy to do something as simple as responding to the messages from the people closest to me. 

During the summer of 2020, I discovered Phoebe Bridgers after coming across the song “Scott Street” from Bridgers’ first album Stranger in the Alps, and I was immediately hooked. I began listening to everything she had ever released and felt truly understood for the first time in my life. Bridgers has a way with her lyrics and production that makes you feel comforted and understood, and that is exactly what I needed during this time in my life; it felt as though I had found something to save me from this dark hole I was in. 

There was one time it really felt like she was saving me in some way. My family went camping with our trailer for a couple of days, being so close in proximity to them for this long was truly my worst nightmare. All I did for those couple of days was sit in the trailer alone or walk around the campground with my headphones on listening to Stranger in the Alps, specifically the songs “Demi Moore,” “Killer,” “Smoke Signals,” “Scott Street” and “Georgia.” These songs are all that got me through those couple of days, had I not discovered Bridgers’ music the week prior, I’m not sure I would have been able to cope even in the slightest. The experience and connection I have had with Bridgers’ music is unlike anything I have ever experienced, but there are still some other artists and bands who have been able to get me through hard times.

Concerts are some of the best cures for me when I’m at my lowest. I had the opportunity to see Bridgers in June of 2022 at the RBC Echo Beach venue in Toronto. That day changed my life. The anticipation that builds in the days leading up to the event, watching the countdown get smaller and smaller and feeling like you’re in a dream sitting on the GO train and standing in line outside of the venue; these are all things before the show even begins that makes you forget about your struggles. It felt like the world stopped for a second when I saw her walk onto the stage for the first time. Seeing your favourite artist in that space is an out-of-world feeling. Being able to feel the music and Bridgers’ voice through my body made my connection to her music even stronger. There is just truly no happier feeling than seeing your favourite artist right in front of you, singing the songs you have been listening to and connecting with for so long. For those couple of hours, I felt like nothing else mattered and I was the happiest I had ever been. 

I was also lucky enough to see Boygenius, a band that Bridgers is a part of along with Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker, at the Budweiser Stage in Toronto in June of 2023 with my girlfriend. They were touring for their most recent album The Record, which happened to come out the same day my girlfriend and I met for the first time. As sad as most of the songs on that album are, we really bonded through listening to it. Getting to see Boygenius live with my girlfriend was so special, and it made us both so happy to be able to experience music so personal and close to us, live. 

These shows made me feel like all my problems had gone away for a small period of time and that was exactly what I needed in those moments. Concerts are a great way to cope with mental health struggles and it’s also very helpful to have something so exciting to look forward to.

More recently, Radiohead has been a band I turn to when I’m struggling with my mental health. The distinct production of songs like “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” “Just,” “Jigsaw Falling Into Place,” “Exit Music (For A Film),” “Climbing Up the Walls” and “Spectre” encapsulate the low feelings I have. I’m able to connect with the music on a whole new level, focusing less on lyrics as the sound itself somehow makes me feel understood. 

As much as these depressing songs have helped me, there are times when I just need music to cheer me up and not to relate to. Tyler, the Creator is an artist whom I can always turn to when I need to switch my mood. I get excited every time I listen to any of his music because of how fun and experimental it is. His music allows me to escape from depressing feelings, and for a little while, I get to forget about all of my problems and just enjoy how good his music makes me feel.

Another musical outlet that has helped me when I am struggling with my mental health is playing guitar. Since I feel so connected to a lot of the songs I listen to, it is often very beneficial for me to learn these songs and be able to play them on the guitar. Playing music releases so many more emotions and allows me to connect even further with songs that hit me so deeply. I find distractions to be very helpful when struggling with my mental health and playing guitar is a great one. Choosing a song and putting all of my attention into learning it has been an incredible tool to help me at my lowest points; it allows me to close off from the world and feel like it is all that matters for a few moments. 

Playing guitar has also brought me much closer with my uncle which has been very important to me since I don’t have a very good relationship with most of my family members. Being able to have that relationship with him through playing guitar has made a lot of the mental struggles I face surrounding the lack of relationship with my family a little bit better, and when you’re feeling that low, a little goes a long way. The feeling of finally mastering a song that I’ve been practicing for a while can also improve my mood so much. Knowing that I’m capable of accomplishing something can mean so much to me when I’m not doing well mentally. 

Music is one of the most important aspects of my life and without it, I would not be able to cope with any of my struggles. It is always there to bring me out of darkness and it is comforting to know that it will always be there. While music is such a helpful resource when struggling with mental health, it is still incredibly important to engage in professional help and use any resources around you to help you get there. The impact that artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Radiohead and Tyler the Creator have had on my mental health is greater than words can explain and I will forever be grateful that I have music as my support through hard times.

If you're struggling with your mental health, you can find helpful resources on this City of Toronto page. You can also find Toronto Metropolitan University specific resources here. 

Musical Memories: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Music is inseparable from memory, so you better hope it’s good music you’re listening to!

By Sam Santos   

Human memory works in strange ways, none more intriguing than how music can impact it. There are certain moments in our lives that we attach to a song, even if insignificant or seemingly mundane. 

As I write this intro while waiting for my international literature lecture to start, a girl I don’t know got up and played Ghost by Justin Bieber on the piano, much to everyone’s surprise. I’m not the biggest “Belieber,“ but I know the next time I hear the song I’ll remember this particular moment.

Music has the power to transcend time and space. It manifests itself in our memory, sometimes subconsciously. For me personally, there are certain moments in my life that are inseparable from a particular song or artist. 

Imagine a collection of songs you despise greatly. Now imagine listening to them on repeat during the course of a 10-hour shift at the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE), a fair that takes place over 18 days in August and September every year in Toronto, in the sweltering heat of August. Unfortunately, I don’t have to imagine!. 

I ran a carnival game by myself with no coworkers nearby, so taking in the sights and sounds was the majority of the job. There were rare positives in this regard, like when an Amy Winehouse tribute concert was held within earshot. Most of the time though, I was subject to a loop of the same songs over and over. I don’t remember all of them, but here are some notable examples. 

Girls Like You (feat. Cardi B) by Maroon 5 

Some people like it when a Maroon 5 song includes a random rap verse for help on the Billboard charts. I am not one of those people. I thought I didn’t like Cardi B before, but after hearing this track on repeat, that disdain has grown to heights I didn’t think were possible. 

I Gotta Feeling by Black Eyed Peas 

I admit I am biased enough to give this song a pass. One of my earliest memories of music is dancing to I Gotta Feeling at my friend’s 4th birthday party in 2010. No complaints here. 

bad guy by Billie Eilish 

Eilish’s vocal technique is very unique and I happen to really enjoy some of her stuff. When it comes to bad guy, something about the xylophone-like refrain throughout the song just makes me want to fill my ears with cement. 

Cha Cha Slide by Mr. C The Slide Man

This is another musical memory within a musical memory, because most Ontario Gen-Z kids will recall hearing this song at some point in their journey through the public school system.

However, by no means do I ever want to listen to it on repeat again, no matter how sweet it was to hear as a kid. Hearing this song upwards of 10 times a day was truly akin to being waterboarded with Kool-Aid. 

Cold Heart - PNAU Remix by Elton John, Dua Lipa, PNAU 

I will not stand for this crude bastardization of Rocketman... enough said. 

Baby Shark by Pinkfong 

The most egregious inclusion on this list by a wide margin has to be this children’s hit. There are very few songs that could even dream of competing with the repetitive abhorrence of Baby Shark. The fact that it was even included in the playlist boggles my mind. 

Sonic Boom Records is basically a candy store for someone like me (Sam Santos/CanCulture)

I have much more positive memories of songs that I listened to willingly. The Morning by The Weeknd, from his 2011 mixtape House Of Balloons, has an ironically misleading title. The dark synths and cold lyrics are more reminiscent of a drunken Friday night bleeding into Saturday, certainly not anything bright or cheery. At some point during the summer of 2022 though, I began listening to The Morning to start my day. 

I’m not sure if someone put the idea in my head or not, but that was my wake-up soundtrack for quite a while. That song, and by extension, the entire mixtape, contains themes of heavy partying, self-destruction and regret. I think that in addition to those main themes, it symbolizes the breaking down of walls and having to confront reality eventually. Something about the brutal honesty of that has always been appealing to me. 

I bought a House Of Balloons vinyl from Sonic Boom Records on Spadina Avenue that same summer. It was the only copy in the bin and I felt like I had just won the lottery. The two friends who were with me that day didn’t quite grasp the magnitude of me randomly finding that record, but it was one of the highlights of my summer. That day was extremely hot, into the high 30s, and we explored the dimly-lit malls of Chinatown to escape the heat. 

Record collecting is an expensive but rewarding hobby. Not only do you get to physically own music you love, but you get to tell the stories associated with acquiring that music. 

The folks at Sonic Boom Records were kind enough to let me take some pictures in the store for the thumbnail of this story. While I was there, I found a signed copy of Kendrick Lamar’s Untitled Unmastered. Turns out, even writing about musical memories can lead to making more of them. 

The last memory I want to share also relates to the CNE (and Kendrick Lamar), but thankfully is more positive than the previous story. Before the fair itself, my job interview took place at the Exhibition grounds. I was, admittedly, quite nervous. 

The interview went well and I was hired on the spot. I remember walking away with a silent fist pump before popping in my AirPods and shuffling my playlist. No More Parties In LA by Kanye

West and Kendrick Lamar was the song that came up first. An unconventional celebratory song? Absolutely. But sometimes unconventional is exactly what you’re in the mood for. 

When it comes down to it, you can’t avoid some less-favourable songs from seeping into your mental hard drive every once in a while. I’m thankful for that, though. It makes the good musical memories all the more enjoyable.

Musical Memories: My journey to the Black Parade

I took my unassuming uncle to see My Chemical Romance *not clickbait* 

By Ella Miller

Milton Keynes was never the same after the boys from Outer Jersey attacked on May 19, 2022. Neither was my psyche. (Image courtesy of my uncle, Dennis Flood)

Just over a year ago I went to see My Chemical Romance on their reunion tour. My Chem is my favourite band and one of the only bands, as a non-music-listener, that I can put on for hours straight and love every minute of.

I had taken a gap year and had been living with my family in London, England, for a few months. I was working at a Whole Foods to pay off my visa and plane tickets and realized with a little cash on my hands, I could maybe treat myself to going to a live show.

At the time, My Chemical Romance’s fabled return tour had been in the works for almost three years, the band having reunited in 2019 after a six-year hiatus. They had planned to go on tour beginning in 2020, but a certain worldwide pandemic got in the way of that.

For once in those black hole years of the pandemic, the stars aligned, and thanks to these delays, I was in the right place at the right time. That place being Milton Keynes, on the eve of May 19, 2022.

The Milton Keynes show was only the third on the tour and took place months before the band set foot in Canada for their Toronto and Montreal dates. If I went, I would be among the first Canadians, first North Americans even, to see the band perform since their hiatus.

I excitedly told my uncle that I was hoping to go to this show and that the public transit options were promising, so I should have no issues getting there. He explained it would probably be better to drive there, and if I got him a ticket, he would play chauffeur.

I agreed. I spent a few days biting my nails to nubs as I puzzled over which seats to pick before handing over a grossly large sum of money for a massive cheapskate like myself to the Dark Lord.

My entry from April 25, 2022. Oh how naive I was…

Once Ticketmaster had my money, there was no going back. I was really going to see My Chemical Romance. I only had one crushing thought: How am I going to explain this to my uncle?

For those unacquainted with the cult of My Chemical Romance, the fanbase can be intense. The band is truly for the weirdos by the weirdos, and because of that, the fans are fiercely protective of the musicians who give them a place to call home. The MyChem lore is dense and accessible only through geriatric LiveJournal pages and 144p Much Music rips from the early-2000s.

I knew that there was really no way to indoctrinate my uncle into the cult in a timely fashion. All I could do was focus on myself, and making this experience as seamless as possible.

The day of the concert, despite my efforts to manifest a clean bill of health, I was, in fact, sick.

An entry from May 18, 2023. I didn’t get a canker actually (Ella Miller/CanCulture).

Nothing was going to prevent me from seeing this show, however. My uncle and I made the agonizing crawl through rush hour London traffic that nearly doubled the length of the trip. Our commute to the venue was not helped by the parking situation.

Unlike in Canada and the United States, where developers will gladly bulldoze a nature reserve to build a behemoth parking lot, England does not have the space for such luxury. The parking we got was over a 40-minute walk from the actual venue. We then stood in a line that spanned the length of the stadium. It was pop-punk purgatory – I get sweaty just thinking about it.

The first (of many) entries from May 19, 2022. The British take queuing very seriously (Ella Miller/CanCulture).

It was during this time that I could see my uncle start to truly reflect on his life decisions. There he was, in a fleece zip-up sweater, surrounded by punks with their eyebrows pierced with unsterilized safety pins.

I would not call him entirely out of place, though.

Despite the concert acting as a homecoming for the emo community, the community is diverse. I was delighted to see an elderly woman on a mobility scooter there, supported by her family and absolutely killing it in black lipstick.

When we finally got to our seats, and after I fought tooth and chipped black nail for some merch, it got real.

Yes. On the fateful day of May 19, 2022, I got the Boy Zone shirt (Ella Miller/CanCulture).

The opening acts finished and the stadium went electric, an energy flickering through the crowd spreading from person to person. We were a tinderbox ready to ignite, hungering for that spark. We wanted to be engulfed and transformed.

The unease of the crowd was not entirely self-perpetuated. The band’s sound crew had begun to play a low radio static buzzing over the speakers. The entire stadium was in a plague of locusts simulation, which did nothing to calm my already fraying nerves.

A journal entry from May 19, 2022 detailing the absolute torture MyChem must have inflicted on people with tinnitus (Ella Miller/CanCulture).

The band appeared onstage to no fanfare. They simply walked on, radio static still pulsing through the air. The crowd more than made up for the band’s lack of bombast. We became living haunted houses, racked with screams and jolts, entirely unable to contain spectres within.

This jacket-shaming remark wasn’t out of nowhere–it’s a reference to an old Fuse interview from 2006 (judging by Gerard’s hair). May 19, 2022 (Ella Miller/CanCulture).

Okay, maybe I lied a little when I said that there was no fanfare.

To understand, I must delve into the My Chemical Romance lore. My Chem, pre-hiatus, was known as a very theatrical band. Their manifesto, in fact, was to be as dangerous as possible. At the helm of it all was their lead singer, Gerard Way.

Over the course of the band’s hiatus, though, this theatricality seemed to have bled away. The now-older Way, in his few media appearances, would be spotted in mottled green army jackets and jeans. Cozy, yes, but a far cry from the skeleton onesies and candy apple mop tops of the past. I didn’t really care about this transformation and had accepted this as our new reality.

I was wrong. I was so wrong.

Hi, I just want to take this time to appreciate the other members of the band who I don’t mention, but Ray, Mikey and Frank were also there on May 19, 2022 and they slayed (Ella Miller/CanCulture).

The night of the concert, Way shed his skin as a mild-mannered father and emerged onstage as a contorted bloody creature somewhere between the White Violin, 90s David Bowie and Carrie. He stalked the stage with meandering paces, occasionally falling to his knees and writhing like a person possessed. He screamed and moaned, ranting about rats, before waxing poetic about the one-eyed stray cat he had adopted.

They were still the same band.

The first song, ‘Foundations of Decay’, began, and there was no going back. The concert itself was transcendent. The overwhelming bass drum and walls of sound present in ‘Mama’ and ‘Destroya’ ripped me apart from the inside, chattering my teeth and shaking me damn near out of my shirt; the nostalgic Smashing Pumpkins-esque ‘Summertime’ played as the sun set; my uncle left to go to the washroom just as the G note from ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ hit – he returned to 20,000 people on their feet scream-crying the words to the centrepiece of a generation-defining rock opera and he had no idea. I cannot emphasize how perfect it all was.

Seeing ‘It’s Not a Fashion Statement’ played live for the first time in 15 years on May 19, 2022 was one of the most raucous moments (Ella Miller/CanCulture).

The show concluded with two encores, one of which was dedicated to the people who should have been at that concert but had passed away over the course of the pandemic. The tribute was set to ‘Skylines and Turnstiles’, the song that founded My Chemical Romance.

For me, that was evidence that after all these years, the connection between the band and the fans that made them was still there. We had grown and changed, but maybe not so much that we had forgotten.

A little addition to my May 19, 2022 entry: Mikey didn’t get to the mic in time to do the intro. One day maybe (Ella Miller/CanCulture).

When the lights came up and everybody hissed like vampires (these are My Chemical Romance fans, after all) we knew it was time to leave. Nothing can last forever, and the Great Emo Convergence of ‘22 was no exception. My uncle and I began the trek back to the parking lot.

The final entry from May 19, 2022, though my processing of the events of that day would continue for much longer than the last page of my journal (Ella Miller/CanCulture).

I was in a daze, not entirely believing the evening that I had experienced. I thought to myself, “I did not just see the disembodied voices that make the music in my headphones for real. They aren’t real. They can’t be.”

The next few weeks – weeks! – would be me coming to terms with the fact that the experience happened. The diary entries seen throughout this piece became my tether, reminding me that I had gone and it wasn’t an elaborate fever dream brought about by my sickness.

Every time I could get it through my head that I had been there, I was filled with overwhelming ecstasy. In my mind, I was part of history: a fantasy world had become real for the first time. I had entered Narnia and returned armed with an assault on the senses that I remain grateful for every time I remember it.