Music has set me free more than almost anything else.
I know that sounds dramatic, and probably a little pretentious. To be clear, I’m nowhere near talented enough as a musician to start talking about music as some profound spiritual salvation. But… I mean it in a fairly ordinary way. Music has been a source of discovery, peace, rebellion, escape, memory, and occasionally a mode of meditative therapy of sorts. I don’t mean to suggest that learning the piano can replace a competent treatment plan (although it might be more useful than some treatment plans I’ve encountered). Rather, music has always been central to keeping my own mental health in check.
Along these lines, there are two things I adore about music.
The first is playing it.
I’ve played guitar for years and one of the things I’ve always found fascinating about playing music is that it seems to require the absence of thought. You cannot, or at least I cannot, think and play at the same time.
Music is incredibly complicated. There are scales, keys, timing, rhythm, technique, improvisation and countless moving parts that must come together to make a song work. Sort of like an imaginary jigsaw coming together unconsciously in the heads of musicians. It’s mad. Yet the moment I start thinking too much, I stop playing properly.
If I develop an awareness of next chord, I miss it. If I start paying attention to what my fingers are doing, they suddenly seem incapable of doing it. I’ve spoken to enough musicians over the years to know this isn’t unique to me. What fascinates me is the paradox. Music is infinitely complex, yet actually playing it seems to require that you stop thinking. This is not even unique to music. Top penalty takers talk about not thinking, expert tennis players highlight the importance of being focused only on the ball and not the point or the match or the crowd or anything else. Tyson made famous the idea of boxers having a plan until they get punched in the face - instead, they need instinct - something that lies beneath deliberate execution or conscious awareness. I could go on and on about this - I’ve noticed that this paradox covers all contexts. It might be best surmised by the idea that “in order to be successful, one cannot look too directly at success”. Process over outcome etc. Anyhow, back to music.
For an hour, playing guitar on the balcony, there is nothing to solve. Whatever was bothering me before I picked up the guitar drifts away, because it has to in order to play guitar. There is just the note or chord I am playing and hearing in that moment.
So that’s playing… Then there’s listening.
I’ve become increasingly interested in the lyrics people love. While my patience for small talk has eroded over the years, I never get tired of talking about music and I love to know what people are listening to and why, especially specific lyrics that resonate with them. I’m convinced that such lyrics tell us something important about what sits beneath the surface of our identity.
By way of example… One of my favourite lyrics features in Bob Dylan’s Shelter from the Storm:
“I’m living in a foreign country, but I’m bound to cross the line. Beauty walks a razor’s edge, someday I’ll make it mine”.
I have absolutely no idea what Dylan meant by it. I’ve never researched it and I don’t particularly want to.
For me, there’s a rebelliousness in that lyric, clearly something nomadic. Something about existing just outside the ordinary boundaries of things and feeling inevitably drawn towards whatever line you’re not supposed to cross (I always cross them). I’ve spent much of my adult life living abroad, so perhaps that’s part of it.
Then there’s that line.
Beauty walks a razor’s edge.
It’s gorgeous.
The thing we’re all trying to capture in one form or another - beauty, meaning, mastery, security, love, art, intimacy - seems remarkably difficult to get hold of and retain. It doesn’t arrive with any certainty, always requires vulnerability, and torturously comes (if it does) with the high probability of disappearing again.
Accordingly, Dylan follows with:
Someday I’ll make it mine.
There’s hope there, but no guarantee. The journey towards attainment is the thing, not the thing itself. Process over outcome etc…
Bruce Springsteen - Factory
“Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life”.
I adore this song.
Partly because the music and the lyrics seem to be doing exactly the same thing. Springsteen somehow captures drudgery in the music itself. You can hear the repetition, the mandatory routine, the grey diesel-stained industrial estate full of pale faces and solemn nods of acknowledgment. The feeling of a man walking through factory gates because that’s just what he’s done every morning for 20 years.
The song always makes me think of my dad.
We’ve had a complicated relationship over the years, but one thing I’ve always respected about him, and my mum, my stepdad Kev, and much of my family is that they’ve worked incredibly hard.
There is a seriousness about work in working-class families that I’m pleased I have retained. No matter what - you get up, you go to work, you do your job. While that is an outdated idea in 2026, and though it might run counter to what we know about pressure, stress, neoliberalism and the ‘docile body’ etc… it’s still how I choose to live.
What awakens me about the lyric is that the factory is robbing this man of the very senses that bring him into contact with the world. It’s taking his hearing.
Yet the factory is also the thing that holds his world together - his routine, Sisyphean though it is, his friends, his understanding of himself. There is structure, tragedy, resignation, honour, nobility, and a load of other stuff in their. The song is a multitude of paradoxes strewn together in a melancholic train beat which soldiers on much like the factory worker.
Talking Heads - This Must Be The Place
The final lyric comes from Talking Heads’ This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody):
“I’m just an animal looking for a home and share the same space for a minute or two”.
Check out the video below for the most iconic live performance of all time.
I think this might be one of my favourite lyrics ever written. Again, I’m not particularly interested in what David Byrne meant. What I hear is somebody who is adrift and looking for somewhere to belong.
The lyric contains two completely different feelings at the same time. There’s something desperate about it - I’m just an animal looking for a home. It’s about the human condition, perhaps, and how we are all bonded by our need for belonging, connection, finding somewhere you fit. Then Byrne follows it with a line that sort of shrugs off any sincerity while simultaneously reifying the desperation for connection.
Share the same space for a minute or two.
A minute or two. Such a fleeting amount of time, but I’ll take whatever I can get. The lyric somehow manages to feel deeply needy and strangely casual at exactly the same moment. It reminds me of something I was told years ago - that, for us humans, social loneliness is a bigger killer than heart disease. We need each other.
So those are three lyrics I love.
They seem to point towards things I value, questions I keep returning to, and contradictions that I still haven’t managed to resolve.
If somebody asked you for three lyrics that have stayed with you for years, which three would you choose? And what might they say about you?
