Chapter 4: Comfort

CHAPTER 4

Comfort

or “Before There Was Prozac, There Was You”

Eddie—the dishwasher at the pancake restaurant where I worked—lunged at my boss Victor with a kitchen knife. Victor fled, through the restaurant, just two steps ahead of him, knocking over a stack of high chairs and a few skinny teenage waitresses as he tried to get away. “I’m going to kill you!” Eddie shouted as Victor ran into the back, the Sunday morning patrons left agape. They had made two more complete circles through the restaurant and back room when Victor knocked over a tray of glasses. Eddie ran on over the broken glass without hesitation, passing by the griddle where I was cooking, and I grabbed his arm, pinning it momentarily to the counter. The knife fell out of his hand and straight down, lodging in his foot. The rest of the crew helped him pull the knife out while Victor made it to the parking lot and drove off. I went back to cooking pancakes and Eddie limped out the side door, and we never saw him again. All this over a song. And not just any song, but Tony Orlando and Dawn’s “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree.” I understood Eddie’s frustration (though perhaps not his chosen cutlery-based response), because having music in the back room was what helped all of us get through the dreary workday. But it had to be the right music, and this was something that the ragtag bunch of us who’d ended up at the Newport, Oregon, Sambo’s restaurant could never agree on. We all found comfort in music, and in fact it was this quality of music that had landed me there in Newport in the first place.

I dropped out of college to join a rock band, not because I found myself more interested in rock and roll than in calculus and physics (I didn’t), but for my mental health. My school subjects were intellectually stimulating, but I hadn’t made any friends my first year away from home and I was lonely. Music had always been a comfort to me during my largely solitary childhood. I found myself listening to music more and more during that first year away from home, and that made me want to play music more and more. The six songs that inspired me in 1975—that made me want to become a musician at least in those days—were:

“Autobahn” by Kraftwerk. These guys ushered in what is now regarded as an entirely new genre—techno (sometimes called electronica)—and like all great musicians, they made it seem easy. Combining long-form, classical themes with a kind of geeky interest in electronics and creating their own synthesizer sounds, they seemed to be just the kind of sciency, music-y nerds that I could aspire to being. The song from the album of the same name was a twenty-five-minute tour de force of drawn-out arpeggios and McCartney-ish shifts from major to minor tonality.
Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, performed by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic. The development of the main themes and variations on them, the counterpoint running through, are all laid out so transparently, so clearly for the listeners that it sounds as though this piece wrote itself. When listening to any one instrument, I felt that what the other instruments are doing at the same time is inevitable, obvious, that if only I could write a single melody, the other parts would present themselves to me automatically. Of course I knew that wasn’t true, but the ease with which Beethoven navigated harmonic space inspires me still.
Revolver by the Beatles. (I can’t single out one song from this album, but I listened to the album uninterrupted, hundreds of times, as though it were a song.) When this record first came out, I was only nine and not ready for it—I didn’t discover it until college. The sense of play, fun, and camaraderie among the musicians is very noticeable, and the music still sounds fresh to me. Their songs took on a more sophisticated lyrical, melodic, and harmonic quality with this album than on previous albums by the group. They sounded like they were having such a good time!
“Through My Sails” by Neil Young with Crosby, Stills & Nash. The delicate vocal harmonies here still give me chills. Think of the Everly Brothers to the second power. The blend of their voices is gorgeous, comforting, and warm. It is usually Stills who performs songs with a solo lead vocal, joined at certain points by the lush background voices (“Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” “See the Changes,” “Woodstock”), but here for the only time I’ve ever heard, Young pulls a Stills and delivers a few call-out lines, his voice enmeshed in the harmony the rest of the time. I’d always figured that Neil was too much of a loner, and too impatient to rehearse and practice, to work out the harmonic synchrony necessary to pull this off. Years later at a party, Graham Nash told me that this was in fact true: That for this song, he, Crosby, and Stills had taken the tapes and painstakingly worked out their parts after Neil had recorded his. Neil told me not long afterward that he really doesn’t like working over things, preferring the spontaneity of the moment. Neil even boasted to my friend Howie Klein—who at the time was president of Neil’s record label, Reprise—that he had written and recorded an entire album in just two days.
“The Great Gig in the Sky” by Pink Floyd. This came from their concept album Dark Side of the Moon, the band’s second effort (after Meddle) at playing with large-scale thematic connections among the tracks, more like a symphony than anything else that had ever been done in rock. The use of classical devices and narrative arc on the album got me thinking big, about merging classical and rock music. The singer, a guest vocalist named Clare Torry, delivers a chilling vocal performance—so much passion and sadness conveyed by the human voice that, even though there are no lyrics, the message seems so clear.
“Night and Day” by Stan Getz. As a sax player myself, I love listening to Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Wayne Shorter, and Charlie Parker, but Stan Getz has always held a special place for me because of his tone and his eco nom ical playing style. He was the first saxophonist whose parts I could get under my fingers; they just lay so easily on the instrument, and because of the hard rubber mouthpiece I used (and I suppose the shape of my mouth), I was able to emulate his tone more easily than the others’. I knew I could never play as fast as Bird, but I found comfort in knowing that a relatively slow player like Getz (Was he the B.B. King of the saxophone?) could still have a career.

My parents were naturally disappointed that I planned to drop out, unsure of what kind of future I could make for myself without a college degree. I told them about my plans to become a professional musician, but said I wasn’t really sure how to go about it. They confessed that they didn’t know either. I joined a series of rock bands that didn’t get very far. We would collapse under the weight of our own incompetence, or we would simply find it impossible to get booked at clubs. After more than two years or so of such floundering, I came home to visit for my father’s birthday in October. My father is a businessman who has always had a preter-natural gift for problem-solving. His entrepreneurial spirit led him in his younger days to start his own accounting business, but he soon moved to a position at a large corporation. In his mind, there was an apt analogy here: Starting a band from scratch might be more difficult than joining a going concern, he told me. I realized that I had been playing with musicians who weren’t much better than I, and in fact, I was often the best in these little groups that were forming. And I wasn’t particularly good. That was no way to learn. If I was to become a professional, I had to be the worst member of the band. And so I set out to become the worst musician I could in a really good band! Or rather, I set out to become good enough that I could join a band of musicians who were just out of my league, who could help raise me up a notch in ability, who saw in me some potential that could be sculpted and molded.

My father gave me a book written by George Plimpton called The X Factor that described how people become experts in their respective fields. Plimpton points out that successful people have had far more failures than unsuccessful people. Of course this seems paradoxical. But the resolution is this: People who eventually become successful have had many, many failures along the way, and what distinguishes them from the rest of the population is that they don’t give up. These leaders—corporate heads, expert chess players, actors, writers, athletes—look at failure differently than everyone else. First, when they fail, they don’t assume that there is anything wrong with them (“I’m not good enough,” “I suck”), nor do they figure that this is a permanent state (“I’m never going to get better,” “I will always suck”). Rather, they look upon each failure as a necessary step toward reaching their ultimate goal. People who become successful see the progress toward a goal as involving a number of steps that will inevitably produce some minor setbacks. “This is something that I need to know in order to reach my goal,” they say to themselves. “And until now, I didn’t even know that I needed to know this. This setback is an opportunity to now go about acquiring the knowledge that is necessary to succeed.”

In order to be the worst musician in a better band than the ones I’d been playing in, I knew I needed to practice more. But with the sort of menial jobs I could get without a college degree, all my income went toward the high rents in California, even with five people crammed into a three-bedroom flat (one person sleeping in the living room and one the dining room). I moved to Oregon, where I knew rents were cheap, so that I could spend most of my time practicing the guitar. I took a job as chef at Sambo’s, a chain of pancake restaurants, and I could make my expenses in just two days a week of work—leaving plenty of time to practice the guitar. After six months of playing eight hours a day, I felt myself getting pretty good and I answered an ad at the local grocery store for a band that was looking for a lead guitarist, the Alsea River Band. This was a well-known band on the Oregon Coast, and they had actual gigs lined up several months in advance. They were led by a singer and songwriter named Étienne who was originally from Quebec. He may have been no older than forty-five, but that was ancient to me at the time, and his heavily creased face looked world-weary, battered, and he sang about love lost like he had lived every word. The band was a four-piece when I joined, Étienne playing rhythm guitar, a husband-and-wife duo on bass and keyboard, and a drummer. Étienne couldn’t play lead, but he knew what he wanted to hear. He gave me cassette tapes of his songs as done by the band before they lost their lead player, and of some of his favorite music, by Hank Snow, George Jones, and Tammy Wynette. I had never played country music and I had no particular interest in becoming a country musician, but this was the only game in town, and they were good, and I mean really good.

So what if I didn’t want to play country? My father said that in business (and music, he assumed) it was important to be flexible. Wouldn’t I learn a lot about being a musician, about being in a band?

We rehearsed three nights a week in a trailer that the husband and wife were living in out in the forest, right on the Alsea River itself. No one had much work then; Oregon was in a recession. The drummer worked the counter at a car parts store, the bassist chopped wood, and his wife, the keyboard player, cleaned houses a few hours a week. Étienne had a straight job too, but no one talked about it. The first night I played with them was at the Waldport Lodge, which had seen better days. But it was a Friday night gig, a good night with a lot of people. The bartender introduced us as “an Oregon Coast institution—the Alsea River Band.” Étienne took the microphone and launched into one of his signature tunes, the Shel Silverstein song “I Never Went to Bed with an Ugly Woman (But I Sure Woke Up with a Few).” I had a few little fills to play, nothing complicated. After a Hank Williams medley, we played “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” The crowd loved us and applauded boisterously after every number.

Then Étienne took off his cowboy hat, held it respectfully in one hand, and started talking to the crowd for the first time. He had never been farther south than Oregon, but he had perfected a sort of Memphis/Mississippi Delta accent. “We sher are happy y’all came out ta hear us tonaht, and we’re a-gonna do are best to give y’all a little comfert at the end o’ yer wee-uk.” Étienne knew that most of the audience were unemployed locals, spending whatever they had managed to scrape together to come out to the lodge, to nurse cheap drinks as long as they would last, and to see an actual live band, a rare occurrence in these parts that would help them get through the drudgery of another two weeks or so without anything to do but look for work. “And tonaht yer all vury lucky, cuz we’re featurin’ somethin’ rully special, our new guitarist, Dazzlin’ Dan.” He had named me that because he never could remember my last name, and even so, he couldn’t pronounce it. I didn’t feel particularly dazzlin’. For one thing, I had shown up wearing the same torn jeans and gravy-stained T-shirt that I wore to work, not being able to afford an actual performance wardrobe. Étienne would have none of that—he fished around in his duffel bag right before we went on and gave me one of his old jean shirts to wear. It was two sizes too big, but at least it was clean, and with the sleeves rolled up I looked almost stylish. Étienne wore a Western shirt with hand stitching on the shoulders and shiny, mother-of-pearl buttons. He had all the dazzle. “And Dazzlin’ Dan,” he continued, “is gonna show y’all a little of what five people kin dew tuh-gether when they’s a-playin’ good music.” This was my cue to begin a little lead part that I had struggled over, a complicated fingerpicking pattern to open another of the group’s signature tunes, “Poison Love” by Hank Snow. I played my bit passably, but the crowd was generous, maybe a little drunk, and applauded as Étienne slid into the first line: “Oh your poison love has stained the lifeblood in my heart and soul, dear …”

Standing onstage, surrounded by my new friends, I felt at home. I wished the song would never end. I hadn’t lived long enough to have been done wrong by a woman, but Étienne and the crowd surely had. I started wondering about why the audience would be so happy to be reminded, lyrically, of infidelities and betrayals. It seemed as though there was comfort in numbers, camaraderie in a shared experience. And Étienne was a master at making it all seem okay. He was both a ladies’ man and a man’s man—women of all ages wanted to sleep with him, and men wanted to kick back and tell stories with him. Whatever he had done in his life, whatever he had been, his face and his voice were utterly without guile or deceit. I’ve known dozens of musicians like him, but only a few with his power to make everyone in a room forget about everything that was going on (or not going on) in his or her life, trading it all in for the extended reality of the four-minute song. “Yes,” he seemed to be singing, “we’ve all been hurt, but that’s part of life, and in the end, everything worked out all right and here we all be, together.”

At Sambo’s, the pancake restaurant, we had a little cassette player in the back room that housed the walk-in refrigerator, food preparation area, and dishwashing station. This is where I mixed the pancake batter and the waitresses refilled the Log Cabin brand syrup bottles with a cheaper, no-name substitute. Our dishwasher, Eddie, was a big, overweight, clumsy guy who had never finished the eighth grade. On my first day, several employees went out of their way to tell me to steer clear of him, that he was crazy. No one spoke to him. For reasons I never understood, Eddie took a liking to me, confiding his secrets, telling me his stories. His great ambition was to get a job at the Waldport Lodge of all places because they had a Hobart—a dishwashing machine. “Can you buh-leev it?” he asked me several times a week. “They’s got a machine what cleans the dishes. Theys dishwasher just got to put them dishes in the machine. Set around waitin’ until a li’l green light come on, and den he’s a just gotta take them dishes out. Someday I’m wanna be the green light man. But youse gotta be in the onion to work there, and youse gotta be smart. And I ain’t so smart.”

Eddie was sensitive and kindhearted. He would bring me a muffin every day from the far side of the restaurant. Thinking that he had stolen it for me when no one was looking, he wrapped it surreptitiously in a paper napkin and presented it to me like a prize, singing, “Do you know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man …” The ceremony was so elaborate I didn’t have the heart to tell him that muffins were free to employees, and that as a matter of fact, as chef, I had cooked them in the first place.

The manager, Victor, had grown up in Las Vegas, and gone to Sambo’s management training school at the corporate headquarters in Carpenteria, near Santa Barbara, California, and to his chagrin (he used words like chagrin quite often), he was sent to this small store on the Oregon Coast, far from the bright lights and big city that he felt were his due after all that training. It was Victor who hired me, on only his second day on the job. None of the locals liked him or trusted him. He drove a Mazda, the only foreign car in town. He wore white patent leather shoes with gold buckles and he used words that the coast-dwellers found strange. “I’m chagrined with you,” he would say to a waitress who had fallen behind in her side work. He sized me up and confided that he’d only be working here until he could put a profit on the books, that he had hopes to be sent by Corporate to Salt Lake or Sacramento, or a “real” city, a place he could make a name for himself. If there was anyone the waitresses felt less comfortable with than Eddie the dishwasher, it was Victor.

The waitresses had made a mixtape for the little cassette player in the back and the six songs that they played most often back there were:

“My Guy” by the Supremes (a somewhat rare version compared to the Mary Wells version, which was the big hit)
“Stand By Your Man” by Tammy Wynette
“I Love a Rainy Night” by Eddie Rabbit (“Because he’s so cute,” they said.)
“Nights on Broadway” by the Bee Gees
“Disco Duck” by Rick Dees
“The Morning After” by Maureen McGovern

Victor tolerated the girls’ tape and had brought in one of his own with his favorite music, and when he was in the back—mostly at the beginning of the morning and the end of the day—he would take out whatever was playing and put in his music. Victor’s top six songs were:

“Foreplay-Long Time” by Boston
“Two Tickets to Paradise” by Eddie Money
“Keep On Lovin’ You” by REO Speedwagon
“Carry On Wayward Son” by Kansas
“Lady,” by Styx
“We Built This City” by Jefferson Starship

When “Lady” came on, Victor would cock back the upper part of his body, play air guitar, grimace like a rock star, and mouth the words, looking now and then through squinted eyes all around to see if any of the waitresses were watching this profound display of his manliness.

Eddie was into heavy metal and had his own mixtape that one of his brothers made for him before being sent to prison for beating up three policemen with their own clubs. Eddie’s tape was:

“Road Fever” by Foghat
“Warrior” by Wishbone Ash
“Paranoid” by Black Sabbath
“Running Wild” by Judas Priest
“Runnin’ with the Devil” by Van Halen
“Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando and Dawn

When any of Eddie’s five heavy metal songs were playing, he would wash dishes with a vengeance, scrubbing them cleaner than the day they were new, and doing a little thing that sort of resembled a dance, with him shifting his considerable weight back and forth from one leg to another. He had worn holes in the thick rubber mats where he stood. But when “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” came on he would stand in place, his head hung over his shoulder, his arms limp at his sides, all the weight shifted to one leg. In Eddie’s understanding of the world, the song was about a prisoner who would one day come home and nothing more.

What began as an uneasy truce between Eddie and Victor over control of the cassette player quickly degenerated. Victor didn’t like Eddie’s heavy metal and thought it was “inappopriate” for the restaurant. He’d substitute his tape, but as soon as he left the room, Eddie would put his tape back in, only to have it removed again by Victor. For more than a month, owing just to chance, Victor never walked in on the sixth song on Eddie’s list, to see Eddie not working, idle and locked in his own thoughts. On this particular busy Sunday morning, Victor put in his mixtape and walked up to the front griddle with me to show me how to prepare a new menu item that corporate was introducing, a dish strikingly similar to one that our chief competitor, iHop, introduced two years later called the “Rooty Tooty Fresh ’n’ Fruity Breakfast Plate.” This proto Rooty Tooty Fresh ’n’ Fruity plate consisted of a pancake with two orange slices and a fried egg on top, and a sausage and slice of bacon below arranged to look like a mouth on the pancake’s face. Victor’s tape ended and after a few minutes of musical silence, I saw through the door into the back as Eddie opened the cassette machine. Victor’s tape flew out from the spring-loaded mechanism, and onto the floor into a pile of sudsy water. Eddie ignored it and put his tape in. He hadn’t rewound from the last time, and it was cued up to the Tony Orlando song.

“I’m coming home I’ve done my time,” the singer began. Victor made a face at me and stormed into the back. “Who put this crap music on?” he demanded. He whipped around and stared at one of the waitresses, Tiffany, who was stuffing napkin holders. “Who?” he asked again. Tiffany shrugged. Victor then noticed Eddie, standing motionless with his head hung low over his sink. “Eddie! Why aren’t you working?!” Eddie just stood there, silently mouthing the words. Victor paused for a second and then something clicked. Hiking up his pants, he leaned forward. “Oh, no! Don’t tell me!” he said in a mocking tone. “You? You put on this crap sissy-boy music? Ha ha ha ha!” Victor didn’t just laugh, but held his stomach, like a caricature of someone laughing, and pounded the side of his leg. “I should have known that stupid Eddie would put on this stupid music,” he stretched his arms out wide, turning his body halfway around, announcing to the nearly empty room.

“Don’t call me stupid,” Eddie said, still staring down at the soapy sink, his back to the rest of us. “I ain’t smart. But I ain’t stupid neither.”

Victor wasn’t listening. “Ohhhhhhh,” he said with an exaggerated downward glide, “tough dishwasher man likes to listen to little baby music. Baby music!” He laughed some more and pointed his finger at Eddie.

“Let it go,” Tiffany said softly.

Victor grabbed Eddie by the arm, but Victor’s small hands couldn’t close around Eddie’s large forearm. “Turn around when I’m talking to you, stupid!”

Eddie turned around and he was crying. “The song—the song’s about my brother,” Eddie said.

“Your brother?” Victor mocked him.

“Please,” Tiffany said, a little louder this time, “Victor, please—just let it go.”

“Your brother? I’ve got news for you, stupid. Your brother isn’t coming home.” Victor taunted him. “Didn’t you read in the paper last week?” Victor knew that Eddie couldn’t read. “One of those cops died. Your brother is staying in prison for a long time. He’ll never be tyin’ no yellow ribbons around no tree, oak or nutherwise; the only thing he’ll be tying is his own hangin’ rope. Do you hear me, you big stupid lug? He’s never coming home.”

Eddie furiously grabbed one of the soapy knives out of the washbasin and drew his arm back, tears rolling down his cheeks. Victor sprang backward, smashing his own mixtape where it lay on the floor, and then flew through the back to the griddle area, where I was putting the finishing orange slices on a Proto Rooty Tooty Fresh ’n’ Fruity Breakfast Plate. Eddie followed right behind, the two of them yelling and screaming as our Sunday morning patrons looked on, half-astonished and half-scared out of their wits, while the chorus played jauntily on, “Tie a yellow ribbon round the ole oak tree/It’s been three long years/Do you still want me …”

We never saw Eddie again at the restaurant, and I read a few months later that his brother was killed in a knife fight in the state penitentiary. I did see him on the street a few times, standing in line at the unemployment office, and stopped to say hi. He called me “Dan Dan the Muffin Man.” We never spoke of the knife incident. Victor instituted a new rule that only he was to control the music in the back room. He hired another dishwasher, a man who was legally blind, whom he would taunt endlessly. “There’s a spot on this plate,” Victor would say, holding up a perfectly clean plate. “You’ll have to do it again. Be more careful—can’t you feel the spots? I thought you blind cripples had highly developed extrasensory perceptions. Can’t you feel the spots?”

In many of the places I’ve worked, music has been there as a soundtrack to help the employees get through their day.¹ Of course there is no one song that everyone likes and it can be a challenge to please everyone, but when the right balance is struck, music helps to break the monotony, to comfort us through boring or stressful tasks. Many surgeons I know listen to music in the operating room—even brain surgeons! When I worked as an auto mechanic, the radio in the garage was going nonstop, tuned to the hit rock station. In my laboratory at McGill, where eight to ten people all work in a large room together, each computer workstation is equipped with its own stereo speakers and subwoofer. If the different music starts to compete, each computer station also has a set of headphones, and the students are typically found listening to their music as they perform their statistical analyses or analyze brain images. We all hear music in buses, train stations, dentists’ offices, elevators, Wal-Mart, when we’re on hold. The purpose of this is ostensibly to comfort.

Mothers from every culture sing to their infants, and have done so throughout time as far as we know.² Singing can soothe and comfort infants in ways that other actions cannot, and this is in part because of how different auditory stimulation is from other senses. Sound can be transmitted in the dark, even when the baby’s eyes are closed. Auditory signals feel as though they come from inside our heads, unlike visual signals, which appear to be “out there” in the world. Before the infant’s visual apparatus is fully formed—before it can make out the difference between its mother and other adults—the auditory system is capable of recognizing the consistent timbre of its mother’s voice. Why is it that mothers instinctively sing rather than speak, and why is it that babies find song especially comforting? We don’t have the answers to this, but neurobiology shows that music—but not speech—activates areas of the human brain that are very ancient, structures we have in common with all mammals, including the cerebellum, brain stem, and pons. Song has repetition built into it—of rhythms, melodic motifs—and this repetition gives song an element of predictability that speech lacks. This predictability can be soothing.

The lullaby is the classic song of comfort. Most lullabies that we know of share structural similarities, according to my friend Jonathan Berger. Jonathan is a very highly respected composer and music cognition researcher, as befits his position as a tenured professor at Stanford. We met in his office on the Stanford campus to talk about Six Songs, then wandered down to the Stanford Bookstore, where, surrounded by musical scores in their extensive collection, we continued over lattes.

“I think lullabies are, in a way, arguably in a separate class because (a) they’re functional; they’re for calming someone else. They’re not for calming you. And (b) they have a formulaic pattern. David Huron mentions this, where it’s a big leap and then a slow descent down and the idea is that you grab the attention and then you decrease arousal. And so there’s sort of a melodic pattern to lullabies that puts them in a class by themselves.

“And almost any lullaby fits that melodic pattern. In my undergraduate music cognition class I ask—because it’s a very international group of students—‘Sing your first lullaby that comes to mind’ and they all fit that rule. There is none that I’ve come across that doesn’t fit. [Sings Brahms’ lullaby: da da dee, da da dee, da da DEE da da da dah] There it is, on the ninth note, the large leap. And then stepwise motion from there.”

Music theorist Ian Cross disagrees that lullabies are only for comforting the infant. “First-time mothers experience a great deal of uncertainty and apprehension about their newborns. ‘What do I do with this?’” Singing mutually calms the mother and child. Because it requires regular, rhythmic breathing, it can serve as a kind of meditation for the mother. The slow, steady rhythms of singing lullabies can stabilize respiration, and also heart rate, lower the pulse, and cause muscle relaxation.

Another and perhaps not obvious form of comforting music is music made for the disaffected and disenfranchised. Teenagers who feel misunderstood, cut off, and alone find allies in lyricists who sing of similar alienation. In affluent societies around the world, so many teenagers feel as though they don’t fit in, that they’re not among the cool; they feel lonesome and alone. These function as bonding and friendship songs, for sure, and simultaneously as comfort songs. In the seventies, some of us listened to musicians who sang about things that were not discussed—free sex, smoking cigarettes or marijuana out in back of the school (think Brownsville Station and “Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” or the Animals and “Tobacco Road”). The implicit message of these songs was “You’re one of us—you’re not alone—the things you think and feel are normal.” Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” addressed the millions of teenage girls (and boys) who felt they didn’t fit in because they were not attractive enough:

To those of us who knew the pain

Of valentines that never came

And those whose names were never called

When choosing sides for basketball

It was long ago and far away

The world was younger than today

And dreams were all they gave for free

To ugly duckling girls like me.

In the eighties and nineties, Michael Stipe with R.E.M. and Morrissey (first with the Smiths and then as a solo artist) reached millions of listeners with their songs of depression, alienation, and detachment.

Today when high schoolers feel misunderstood they listen to hip-hop and rap and lyrics such as “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio:

I’m living life do or die, what can I say?

I’m twenty-three now but will I live to see twenty-four

The way things is going I don’t know.

Some comfort songs are refrains, intended to calm us in the face of danger, or soothe us when facing death (either our own, or the death of a close one). In “Death Is Not the End,” Bob Dylan creates a simultaneously anthemic and anesthetic refrain: “When you’re sad and when you’re lonely and you haven’t got a friend/Just remember that death is not the end … When the cities are on fire with the burning flesh of men/Just remember that death is not the end.” As with many songs, the lyrical intent is ambiguous. Is Dylan singing to someone who has just lost a friend, telling her that the friend is not really dead? Or is he suggesting the recipient of the song might consider suicide? Either way, the message that death is just a portal, not the end, and you will live on afterward, is more comforting than the alternative, that death ends everything definitively.

David Byrne described three songs that he reaches for when he feels he needs comfort, or in his words, “consoling”: “I Don’t Wanna Talk About It Now,” “Michelangelo,” and “Boulder to Birmingham,” all written by Emmylou Harris, whose voice Rodney Crowell describes as “equal parts siren and Earth angel—the embodiment of the feminine, the voice you’d want to take to the oft mentioned deserted island.” (“Boulder” was cowritten by Bill Danoff, who wrote “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” the John Denver hit, and “Afternoon Delight,” a hit for the Starland Vocal Band.)

I don’t want to hear a love song, I got on this airplane just to fly

And I know there’s life below

But all that it can show me is the prairie and the sky

“‘Boulder to Birmingham’ is the one she did with Gram Parsons. Somebody beautifully pouring out some pain but not just screaming out like they hit their thumb with a hammer. Pain, but in a much more slow, heartfelt way.”

I asked if he ever picked up the guitar and sang one of his own songs for consolation, if they had that effect on him.

“Once in a while,” he said. “There’s a few—usually more of the recent ones. There are a few that I occasionally play, that I enjoy. The singing is kind of consoling, or cathartic, or soothing to me; which is something that I always wanted to be able to do: to write a song that would be a tool that I could use for myself the way I’ve been able to use other people’s songs. There’s two from my album Look into the Eyeball: ‘The Revolution’ and ‘The Great Intoxication.’”

The Revolution

Amplifiers & old guitars

Country music sung in bars

& when she sings the revolution’s near

Beauty holds the microphone

& watches as we stumble home

& she can see the revolution now

Dirt & fish & trees & houses

Smoke & hands up women’s blouses

Not like I expected it would be

Bubbles pop in every size

It’s analyzed & criticized

& beauty knows that it is almost here

Beauty goes to her address

She shuts the door and climbs the stairs

& when she sleeps the revolution grows

Beauty rests on mattress strings

Wearing just her underthings

& when she wakes the revolution’s here

& when she wakes the revolution’s here

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, Americans were in need of comfort. To a majority of us, the unthinkable, the unanticipatable had occurred with the sudden, coordinated set of surprise attacks on U.S. soil. It wasn’t just our national pride that was injured, but our very sense of safety and security. Many commentators noted that interviews taken with Americans on the street over the few weeks immediately following the attacks were notable for this profound sense of injury, and also for a relative lack of aggressive feelings of wanting to retaliate—those feelings of a militaristic nature came only later, and (arguably) as a result of po litical rhetoric from the White House. During the initial aftermath, radio and television stations, train stations and bus depots, and many public places began to pipe music to Americans. And what did they play? Not the battle-tinged refrains of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” but a song written by an immigrant in 1918, near the end of World War I, Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.”³ “That song spontaneously became our de facto national anthem,” says Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky, a spiritual leader in Los Angeles, “at a time when people were looking for something with which to express themselves, and to bond. It’s amazing—the capacity of that simple melody to unite the country in a way that was both comforting and brought strength—it crossed all divides.”

My friend Amy was diagnosed with a brain tumor a few months ago and is now undergoing radiation therapy. Every day she has to report to the hospital and lie perfectly still for an hour, with a Hannibal Lecter–style titanium mask bolted to her head to prevent even the slightest movement that could cause the proton density beams to miss their mark. It is a very uncomfortable and frightening experience for her. The neurosurgeon who is treating her told her to bring in music every day to the treatment sessions because he knew, based on published research, it helps to relieve anxiety and reduce the painful effects of the procedure. Amy brought in Sting’s The Dream of the Blue Turtles for her first session, and Nothing Like the Sun for the second one. I doubt Sting ever imagined his masterpieces being used in this context, but it has transformed for Amy what could have been a nausea-filled, adrenaline-toxic ordeal into a tolerable if not somewhat aesthetic experience.

Country music lyrics often tell of a love gone bad, or of Hank Williams’s now iconic “cheatin’ heart.” So much of recovery is knowing we’re not alone and that we’re understood. And good music, like good poetry, can elevate a story to give it a sense of the universal, of something larger than we or our own problems are. Art can move us so because it helps to connect us to higher truths, to a sense of being part of a global community—in short, to not being alone. And that is what comfort songs are all about.

While I was dining with Joni Mitchell at an outdoor restaurant once, two women in their late forties approached us, recognizing her. “We just wanted to thank you,” they said, apologizing for interrupting her meal. “We had a really hard time getting through our twenties. This was the 1970s,” they explained. “We listened to your album Blue and it made us feel better. Before Prozac there was you!”

When we are sad, many of us turn to sad music. Why would that be? On the surface of things, you might expect that sad people would be uplifted by happy music. But this is not what research shows. Prolactin, a tranquilizing hormone, is released when we’re sad. Sorrow does have an evolutionary purpose, which is to help us conserve energy and re orient our priorities for the future after a traumatic event.⁴ Prolactin is released after orgasm, after birth, and during lactation in females. A chemical analysis of tears reveals that prolactin is not always present in tears—it is not released in tears of lubrication of the eye, or when the eye is irritated, or in tears of joy; it is only released in tears of sorrow. David Huron suggests that sad music allows us to “trick” our brain into releasing prolactin in response to the safe or imaginary sorrow induced by the music, and the prolactin then turns around our mood.

And aside from the neurochemical story, there is a more psychological or behavioral explanation for why we find sad music consoling. When people feel sad or suffer from clinical depression, they often feel alone, cut off from other people. They feel as though no one understands them. Happy music can be especially irritating because it makes them feel even more alone, less understood. I now know that my boss at Sambo’s, Victor, was probably suffering from clinical depression, and took out his sense of powerlessness on those who were weaker then he. The upbeat, happy song of Tony Orlando and Dawn was enough to make him snap in this condition. When we are sad and hear a sad song, we typically find it comforting. “Basically, there are now two of you at the edge of the cliff,” says Cambridge University music professor Ian Cross. “This person understands me. This person knows what I feel like.” That connection—even to a stranger—helps the process of recovery, for so much of getting better seems to rely on feeling understood—one of the reasons why talk therapy is so successful in cases of depression. In addition, the depressed person reasons, this person who went through what I went through lived through it; he recovered and can now talk about it. Moreover, the singer turned that experience into a beautiful work of art.

The blues may be the ultimate comfort song in Western society during the last hundred years. The “blues” technically refers to a type of chord progression, in its simplest form what musicians call I-IV-V7 (pronounced “one, four, five-seven”) and the many variations and reharmonizations of this basic progression, typically done in twelve-or sixteen-bar phrases (hence the term “twelve-bar-blues”). The lyrical content to this chord progression can be anything, from the Beach Boys praising the beauty of their local beaches and babes (“California Girls”), Chuck Berry paying homage to an especially skillful guitarist (“Johnny B. Goode”), or Steely Dan exploring Eastern enlightenment through the Buddha (“Bodhisattva”). But the prototypical lyric is about someone who has had hard luck, been done wrong by life and circumstance, and this is what makes the songs comforting—the idea described above that sad people are so often made to feel better by sad music.

“Going Down Slow” written by St. Louis Jimmy Oden (and performed by Howlin’ Wolf, the Animals, Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, and Jeff Beck with Tom Jones, among many others) is one of the thousands and thousands of amazing blues songs that have been a cultural legacy of black America throughout the twentieth century and beyond. It is the song of a dying man, looking back on his life, asking for his mother to come to his deathbed. It is heart-wrenching and bittersweet. The Jeff Beck version is one of the most powerful blues performances I’ve ever heard. Tom Jones trades in his normal sexy, confident swagger and inhabits the role of the luckless and life-scarred vagabond, his voice all but unrecognizable, dripping with despair and misery. Beck—widely regarded as among the top five guitar players alive today—plays what may be one of the most powerfully emotional electric guitar solos ever recorded. I played this last week for Sandy Pearlman, producer of Blue Öyster Cult and the Clash. Sitting in my car as we sped down the Trans-Canada Highway, he closed his eyes and smiled with every new note that Beck played. After the first vocal line, as Beck began to play his “call-and-response” guitar fills, Pearlman beamed and said, “Now there is a guy who understands everything about the cognitive neuroscience of emotion and music! He knows just what to play to put goose bumps on the hair that is standing up on the back of my neck!”

A sad song brings us through stages of feeling understood, feeling less alone in the world, hopeful that if someone else recovered so will we, and we feel ultimately inspired that the sad experience led to something aesthetically pleasing. For people who were currently sad at the Waldport Lodge that night, Étienne showed them hope. For those who were over their sadness, Étienne reminded them of how far they had come, having successfully traded despair for at least a temporary peace until the next sad episode might appear.