Music as healing

Posted on September 11, 2026 by Jon Chaisson

[NOTE: This was originally a LiveJournal post of mine from 11 September 2013, and lightly edited. The above playlist is missing only two songs — one was my own, and another is linked below.]

I was working at Yankee Candle that day, and I’ve already posted about what I did, what I felt, and so on. We all have at some point or another. One thing I rarely about, however, is how I got through all of it on a personal level.

Those of you who know me already understand that I’m an obsessive music nerd. I may not have a degree in it, but I’ve been collecting and listening to music since I was a wee kid. I’ve also made mixtapes since I started taping stuff off the radio, and started making my own real mixes around 1988. These mixes often reflected the mood I was in at the time and became a way for me to sort out those emotions and thoughts on my own.

In 1991 I created a compilation called Desert Storm: Sailboats of Ice on the Desert Sand, a highly-charged mix that reflected my anti-war feelings at the time. Considering I was a sophomore in college at the time, one can understand that this particular playlist might be a bit overwrought and self-righteous (Ending with Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction”? How heavy-handed can I possibly get?), but it seemed to help me get over the anger and confusion I felt at the time.

A bit over ten years later, and exactly ten days after the events in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington DC, I put together another compilation to help me sort things out. I needed to put things in some sort of order so I could process what happened then, what some may have felt, and what might come next. I had to do this on my own, with no outside influence. I knew that if I followed the news I’d get overwhelmed; if I read the pundits, I’d only get pissed off; if I reacted to emotion and wished for vengeance, then I wouldn’t be true to myself.

I had to process this in my own way, and music, as ever, helped me through it.

1. Albinoni/Giazotto, comp. ‘Adagio in G Minor’
Certainly, some may connect this track to the more dramatic movie themes — or if you’re me, connect it to the first track of Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Dress for Excess album — but this was actually a connection from a Best Classical Album in the World Ever cd I got from back in my HMV days a few years previous. I listen to this track for what it is; a quiet yet stunning piece of neo-Baroque music that serves to set the scene. In my head, I pictured the sun coming up, the start of a lovely and clear day, maybe even somewhat hot and muggy. There’s a sense of…something, underneath it all, however. One of those feelings of tension but you’re not entirely sure where it came from.

2. Jars of Clay, “Crazy Times”
Everyday stress. A long and frustrating commute. Driving into the city, or taking the train in, or maybe even like me, taking that back road in the pre-morning darkness towards your destination, coffee in the cupholder, contemplating why you’re even up and in this situation. Nothing inherently bad…just temporarily finding yourself in a situation or place that you’d rather not be in, fully knowing that you’d be free of it eventually.

3. Radiohead, “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”
Tension spills over as we get to our destination. It’s another Tuesday workday, and you’d rather still be in bed, even though you’re wide awake, already on your second coffee, and really need to get that project done today. For a brief moment you’re wondering why you’re even here at this job…it’s okay, it pays the bills, but does it make you happy? What do you really want to do? Can you even do it at this point, or do you have to wait another few years and save up? Shit…well, you can’t really think about it right now, can you? Almost time for that team meeting. May as well get it over with.

4. Live, “Overcome”
8:46am ET. “OK. What the fuck just happened…?”

5. The Cure, “All Cats Are Grey”
9:03am ET. “Oh. Oh, shit.”
9:37am ET. “What the fuck is going on…???”
10:03am ET. “…”

6. Nine Inch Nails, “We’re in This Together”
9:58am ET. The South Tower collapses.
10:28am ET. The North Tower collapses.
The first song I thought of as soon as the news had been sent my way. I immediately thought of all those people in the Towers, unable to escape. The people on the planes with no way of escaping. The commuters and the pedestrians below, scrambling to get the fuck out of the area as fast as they could. Tension built up to dangerous levels, where fight or flight kicks in. Where fear feeds or kills. And despite it all, somehow still having that choice whether to live or die, to endure or break.

7. Ciccone Youth, “(Silence)”
Just…silence, as we sit there, staring in disbelief.

8. Pulusha, “Isolation, Part 1”
Everything slowly starts to sink in. We see what we’ve witnessed on the TV, what we’ve heard over the radio, what our friends, our relatives, complete strangers have been telling us. We start processing what happened. Two skyscrapers that many people have known for most of their lives are reduced to rubble. A section of a major government building in ruins. Thousands of people killed. All other planes are accounted for, aside from those four. Some of us know victims, others only hear of them. It’s hard, but we finally let ourselves accept what just happened.

9. The Flying Bohemians, “Intro/Sodabottle”
This is something I’d recorded myself in the summer of 1995. It’s a shortish instrumental played on guitar through flanger and delay, using a soda bottle as a slide (as well as invoking a trippy sound — the title was partly inspired by a college friend who’d made a working bong out of a plastic 7-Up bottle). This is the moment where I’m told by my boss of what exactly happened and the aftermath, and I’m left speechless. I head out to the smoker’s table out back and proceed to light up at least four cigarettes in a row, staring up at the now empty sky. Our warehouse was right under a major flight path for planes out of Boston. I let it hit me fully and completely, just so I could process it all.

10. Manic Street Preachers, “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next”
“Let’s go get those motherfuckers!”
“Kill those shitstains, whoever they are!”
“Goddamn Muslims!”
“Bomb the fuck out of Afghanistan!”
“Oh, you have messed with THE WRONG FUCKING PEOPLE.”
“USA! USA! USA! USA!”
“Kill ’em all!”
“Those fuckers are gonna eat lead!”
“Those bastards are gonna fucking DIE.”
“Give me a goddamn gun, I’m gonna head over there and do it myself if I have to.”
“NOBODY fucks with America.”

Jesus, the fucking noise that came after that silence…

11. Failure, “Daylight”
Some of us wanted to go out and kill the bastards. Some of us wanted to hide from the world until it blew over. Some of us wanted to detach ourselves just enough so we could think clearly. Some of us wanted to know why these events happened. Some of us just…wanted it to be over, just so we could let the healing begin.

12. Temple of the Dog, “Hunger Strike”
By that afternoon, we were all exhausted. We’d bled our emotions dry for the day, leaving us empty. Calmer minds started turning towards the rescue efforts, the security checkpoints, the vigilance of the police, fire departments, FBI agents, the doctors and nurses, everyone from triage up to commanders and commissioners. They kept watch over everything and everyone, often at the risk of their own health and sanity. And for a brief moment, we stopped being hateful towards each other.

13. Jeff Buckley, “Hallelujah”
This song was everywhere that day. Leonard Cohen’s brilliant elegy of perseverance and reconciliation when the world is utterly fucked up beyond fixing seeped into the country’s psyche with Buckley’s sparse and haunting version. We would heal from this. Hopefully.

14. Radiohead, “You and Whose Army?”
Cooler heads finally prevailed, after all the noise died down. We would eventually find and capture–or even kill–the ones who had done this, but we weren’t about to go in guns blazing…at least not yet, anyway. We were still angry and in pain, and we wanted revenge…but many of us felt we could trust those trained to do so–the Armed Forces, the FBI, those in charge–to eventually put this all to rest. We were quiet…but we wouldn’t forget these events, not for a long while.

In retrospect, this didn’t quite unfold the way we wanted or expected — I will spare you the diatribe on that — but slowly, eventually, we found Osama bin Laden and many of his cronies. [EDIT: Twenty-five years later and sadly the day continues to be turned into patriotic porn for the conservative wing while the rest of us are trying to heal and move on.]

15. U2, “Mothers of the Disappeared”
Originally a song about the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, this song was my own personal tribute to those we lost that day. That’s what I try to remember. Not the violence, not the revenge, not the anger…but the loss. How easy it was to erase a life, and how easy it still is to use that loss as an excuse to further fuel blind hate.

16. Chet Atkins w/ Mark Knopfler, “Imagine”
I will freely admit that I am liberal, but in my own way. I will also admit to wanting peace over war if at all possible. On the flipside, though I dislike war, I understand it as an inevitability if and when it happens. I fully admit and embrace this paradox because it’s who I am. I will never be a part of a war as I refuse to take the life of another person for any reason, but I have come to accept that the world is an incomplete, fallible place where things disintegrate and events unfold to cause war. I’ve seen and read about uprisings and revolutions, I’ve witnessed and read about pre-emptive strikes, I’ve read about the after-effects of these things. We’re constantly evolving, and that doesn’t necessarily mean only in a positive direction. Things change whether we want them to or not.

At the end of the day, however, it would be nice to see a day where we can meet in peace, not in animosity.

The season’s upon us…

Posted on November 14, 2024 by Jon Chaisson

WELP. Our store has started playing holiday music as of yesterday. It was only a matter of time, really. They usually start it mid-November, mixing the regular playlist with just a slight dusting of Christmas music, but once Thanksgiving has come and gone, it’s holiday music 24/7.

I don’t mind, really…as a matter of fact, I quite enjoy the holiday music!

The Songs that Inspired the Novels

Posted on January 11, 2024 by Jon Chaisson

While going through some of my mp3s the other day I was thinking about the music that inspired some of the novels I’d written. They weren’t completely inspired by just one song of course, but there was that one track that was pretty much the stepping stone that got the project started in earnest. It got me thinking about some of my other projects and how they got their (musical) start.

The Phoenix Effect / The Bridgetown Trilogy. Poe’s ‘band version’ of her single “Hello” dropped probably a couple of weeks before I started writing The Phoenix Effect in March 1997. I’d had a vague idea of the story I wanted to write for at least a few months, but it was this song that made me realize I was ready to do it. The song itself is very Johnny Mnemonic in its theme — and I had a soft spot for that enjoyable but extremely flawed film — and I realized that movie had a similar mood I was aiming for with this new project. Darker, edgier, angrier. Those weren’t words you’d use to describe my previous writing, to be honest, but I was willing to give it a go. This single got my creative blood pumping enough that it ended up as the first track on the first Songs from the Eden Cycle mixtape.

Two Thousand. This trunked novel was to be my Gen-X ‘becoming an adult without a direction’ story that never quite panned out, based on several related ideas: a close circle of friends regularly meeting up at a bench in Back Bay; a trio of musicians starting a local indie band; the frustrations of following your dreams versus going into the workplace and which obviously paid the rent. The Wolfgang Press’ cover of Three Dog Night’s “Mama Told Me Not to Come” was on their brilliant album Queer, which got played incessantly in The Shoebox apartment while I worked on this. I felt it was the perfect theme song for the project.

Can’t Find My Way Home. I’d come up with the idea for this time travel idea during my time at HMV, when I’d first heard this phenomenal cover of the Blind Faith tune. That gorgeous intro played by Johnny Marr screamed ‘opening theme song’ in my head. It took a few years for me to come up with a story behind it, and it’s gone through various versions and has been trunked multiple times. I’ve recently had a few ideas on a new approach to the story, however, so perhaps this may surface one last time…

Love Like Blood. My trunked vampire novel (it’s there for a good reason in that it’s terrible despite a lot of really good ideas) had been started back in 2004 when I’d been frustrated by my inability to finish The Balance of Light, and I’d been reading a few vampire novels at the time, so I figured, why the hell not? Let’s give it a try, something to focus on so I can at least keep working? This Killing Joke song wasn’t just the opening theme of the novel (the first chapter has a band playing it live at the Paradise in Boston) but it was to set the mood with its ridiculous take on goth tropes. [I haven’t read it in years, so now I’m curious to see how bad it is and if it’s salvageable. I’m in no rush, however.]

Meet the Lidwells! I’ve mentioned before that a lot of MtL borrows from ideas that I’d used in Two Thousand (hey, I wasn’t going to be using them, so…). One of the biggest moments I’d planned in TT was a pivotal ‘make or break’ scene for the lead character and his band, in which they did a blistering cover of this final track off The La’s self-titled album. Years later when I started MtL, I knew that I’d be using that same idea for a pivotal scene, this time pinpointing The Lidwells’ highest career moment they’d ever achieved. It’s the scene near the end of the novel where Thomas Lidwell describes the band performing a live version of their song “Listening” that becomes his all-time favorite moment in the band’s career.

In My Blue World. This one’s a bit obvious, but yes, it was indeed this song that came to mind when I first started writing the novel. At the time I’d just been on an ELO kick and was playing several of their albums when I was planning out the novel itself, but once I started it, I knew this was going to be the opening theme song. For those playing along, in my head there’s a crossfade right at the end of the first scene where Zuze appears for the first time, and the theme song fades in with the movie credits!

Theadia. My space opera was kicked off by this Fuzzbox deep cut off of their second album Big Bang!, one of my favorites despite its 80s pop cheesiness. I just knew that the story was going to revolve around our two nerdy heroes who are trying to save the universe but would really rather be hanging out with close friends and having a good time. I wanted this novel to not be hard sf or steeped in Doctorow levels of tech geekdom. This was the album — and the song — that I put on when I started writing the novel in the last few days of my stay at the former day job at the bank, to remind me that despite how desperate things might become in the story, these two will always find time to be true to themselves. I’m really looking forward to getting this one out as well!

Queen Ophelia’s War. I’d said before that I wrote this novel with the plan of Dialing It Back, just like I had with Diwa & Kaffi. It has its moments of tension and conflict, sure, but I wanted to write something that could also be seen as pastoral as well. And to do that I realized that I also wanted a mixtape that would be similar in feel to what it felt like when I used to listen to Cocteau Twins when I was a teenager. The mood of both the novel and the mixtape then was about the wonders of the unknown and the willingness to get lost in them for a while. Thus putting “Blue Bell Knoll” as the first track on its mixtape!

Year End: Crash and Burn

Posted on December 5, 2023 by Jon Chaisson

Well, shit.

I did have part of a year-end review post in the making yesterday that I was going to post today, but about halfway through writing it my PC suddenly decided that it no longer wanted to read the externals, including my music library which I’d been using to reference said blog post.

Concerned but not overly so, I tried all sorts of things to get them readable again — as well as checking them against my laptop to make sure that it wasn’t the externals that got borked (they aren’t, and I AM VERY THANKFUL ABOUT THAT RIGHT NOW.). After completely wasting time that could have been used for a writing session, turned the PC off and hoped that letting it rest might help.

Aaaaand lo and behold, after restarting the PC after work today, I got a bluescreen.

As I said: well, shit.

I kept my old Lenovo PC for just this sort of thing, to be honest. [I like to joke that my family members are natural EMPs as our computer problems are rarely ever ‘oh you forgot to install this thingie’ and more ‘…good gravy, what the hell did you do to this?’ even though we hadn’t done a thing other than, y’know, use it as intended.] I just excavated it from Spare Oom closet, in hopes that it still works okay, considering it was behaving for the most part (it was just four years old and retired). We shall see where this leads.

[EDIT: Yay, it works! Boo, the USB hub I’d been using refuses to read anything! Yay, the externals work on their own! Boo, for some reason it won’t read the music library external and the film/tv external at the same time! And finally, shrug-emoji, now to wait for Lenovo to contact me about getting the new one fixed/replaced.]

In the meantime, I’d started thinking about what would happen if I had lost my music library. It is indeed ridiculously huge. But at the same time, I thought…well, this would be the end of an era, wouldn’t it? I’d be bummed, sure, but would it affect me as deeply as, say, losing my longhand writing forever? Hard to say, but maybe not? It got me thinking that maybe it’s time to pare it down and clean it up a bit. I’ve been contemplating having two versions of the collection: one that’s full and complete, and one that’s much smaller and for everyday use.

Something else to think about at the end of the year, at any rate.

Couldn’t Miss This One This Year

Posted on November 22, 2022 by Jon Chaisson

The downside to working in retail once more is that I’m no longer able to listen to what I like listening to. I can only listen to KEXP on days off or before/after work. Which means that I’ve been listening to a lot of slightly tinny harmless current pop and retro tunes from the 80s and 90s. Some of it’s good, some not so much, but thankfully the level of oh god not this song AGAIN is at a bare minimum.

I am curious, however, as to whether or not the work tunage will be holiday-themed come this Friday. [Which, by the way, I don’t think I’ll be suffering another Black Friday as we’re not that kind of store. We’re more of a “you mean you forgot cranberries too?” shop.] I’m not complaining mind you, because I actually enjoy holiday music at work. It’s just the right amount of Christmas cheer that isn’t intrusive or distracting. And it’s a theme that crosses all sorts of genres and bends the playlist rules on radio stations and workplace music loops.

Either way, it’s going to be a pretty good year’s end here and I’m not going to complain.

A bit on the new Cure songs

Posted on October 27, 2022 by Jon Chaisson

So The Cure, one of my favorite bands from the 80s and a huge influence not just my songwriting but my fiction writing as well, have finally slipped out a few new tracks! Well, sort of, at any rate. They’re in the midst of a tour and they’ve been playing what seem to be new songs, quite possibly from an upcoming album called Songs of a Lost World (at least that’s the current rumor).

This isn’t the first time they’d test out new songs live before recording them. A lot of bands do that, actually. Let’s give them a listen, yes?

I joked with my friend Chris, who shares my longtime love for the band, that these two new songs passed right by me because I swear they had a song called “Endsong” already. [Well, “End” is on Wish and “Plainsong” is on Disintegration, so my brain probably smooshed the two together.] Still…I like what I hear so far. It’s similar to their track “Homesick” in that it has the slow and extended opening before arriving at the main lyrics, which don’t seem to have a chorus. Very much a Disintegration/Wish vibe going here.

“It Can Never Be the Same”, on the other hand, reminds me a lot of 00s-era Cure, a mix between The Cure and 4:13 Dream. It’s got the patented dark dreaminess but with a tighter and more orchestral sheen. But it also hints at the construction of repetition that made Disintegration so mesmerizing.

What to make of these two tracks that may or may not be a part of a VERY long time in coming future album? It certainly shows that Robert Smith hasn’t rested on his laurels since 2008. Between the numerous tours and guest spots on albums and soundtracks, he’s kept busy. And that classic Cure sound hasn’t gone away, either…their best songs have either been the irresistible pop of songs like “Friday I’m in Love” or “Close to Me” at one end of the spectrum and the epic gloom of “Homesick” and “All Cats Are Grey” at the other. I’m glad to see they’ve still got it.

A few thoughts about music as safety

Posted on October 25, 2022 by Jon Chaisson

I just recently finished reading Brandi Carlile’s memoir Broken Horses and this particular song popped up, one I hadn’t heard for quite a while and forgotten I’d liked. It’s an “it gets better” song. It was partially inspired by a friend’s son that was getting bullied in school for not fitting in.

It got me thinking about my own teen years, in which I immersed myself in music as a form of safety. I wasn’t always bullied, at least not to any major or physical degree, but I definitely received my share of being called a f*g, thought of as a weirdo and excluded from most social circles, and being pigeonholed into a circle of outcasts and townies where I may have been accepted but it was definitely not a match I wanted or needed at the time.

And sure, I’ve already told you about the main reason I got into college radio and what became alternative rock: the whole fuck all of this conformity bullshit, go be true to yourself and you’ll be so fucking happier message it gave me. Not all of those songs had the “it gets better” theme, of course: some reveled in the darkness of life’s unfairness, and some reveled in destroying the status quo. It all spoke to me on a level few other things (and people) did. It said: the only real barriers you’re fighting are your own.

That, in a way, was the hardest lesson to learn of all, and it took me a LONG fucking time to really understand it.

Hearing this song again after so long and I think, yeah…same bullshit, different generation. We still have shitty people tearing others down who don’t conform to their way of living, praying, thinking, whatever. It’s why I’ve managed to stomach the shittiness of American Conservatives: they’re the same goddamn asshole jocks all grown up, still calling us f*gs and bullying us because we’re not like them. And that’s why I’ve managed not to fall prey to their violence: fuck all of this conformity bullshit, go be true to yourself and you’ll be so fucking happier. They still piss me off, but I refuse to let them ruin my life.

I still have my own barriers I’m fighting to tear down. There are far fewer than in the past, thankfully. Maybe a small handful instead of a teetering avalanche. One or two that are just about gone now.

And yet I still return to music for safety. It remains my emotional anchor to this day.

Listening at Work

Posted on October 4, 2022 by Jon Chaisson

I’m actually kind of surprised here.

Most piped-in music at retail stores are feed subscriptions of mostly innocuous pop tunes that are enjoyable but not anything that’ll distract you from your shopping moods. (I say ‘most’ because our local Trader Joe’s seems to have cornered the Gen-X mood of 80s alt-rock faves and cool retro stuff instead.) At my store I can easily file our feed into three distinct formats:
–early 80s MTV (Thomas Dolby, Men Without Hats, Tears for Fears, etc.)
–mid 90s alternapop (Deep Blue Something, Dishwalla, Vertical Horizon, etc.)
–adult pop from about 5 years ago (Kelly Clarkson and so on)

The other day however, I heard this one song that I hadn’t recognized and pulled out the Shazam app. It happened to be the new(ish) 5 Seconds of Summer song I posted above, and thus the surprise: I was so used to hearing the same music loops day in and day out that hearing a new song was quite unexpected. I kinda like it, too! Just goes to show that the subscription feed we have does actually get updated now and again.

It reminded me of one of my other retail jobs, at the Longwood Coop in Brookline, where the loops were actually sent to us in this huge plastic cart that looked like a mutant cross between a laserdisc case and a radio station cartridge, and carried a couple dozen songs. Each cart had a different musical mood, and, you guessed it, I’d try to sneak on the one that had the weird alternative songs, one of which was a New Fast Automatic Daffodils track that I’m sure no one in the store had ever heard of. And during my HMV days, we had a set collection of promos we’d play in store, but on days where I was floor manager I’d throw on some wildly obscure imports instead.

Sure, I don’t have any say in what gets played at this job, but I’m not going to complain about it. Most of it’s enjoyable, and mostly already in my mp3 collection anyway. But it is fun to have that occasional surprise song that trips me up!

Outside Lands This Weekend

Posted on October 26, 2021 by Jon Chaisson

This year’s Outside Lands looks to be a bit more of a sedate affair this time out, mainly due to the changes in schedule and availability of bands, and after this weekend’s weather we’re hoping it doesn’t turn into a Glastonbury/Bonnaroo washout. On the other hand, the choice of bands is quite eclectic and inclusive this time out! Here’s a few bands we’re looking forward to seeing!