08.22.2007
WISHING I'M FINE: 10 SONGS FOR HEALING
THERE ARE SONGS THAT CAN PROVIDE COMFORT FROM THE LITERAL AND METAPHORICAL STORMS IN YOUR LIFE. JOELLE JACINTO LISTS TEN OF THE SONGS THAT DO THAT FOR HER
Sometime in mid-June, my friend Kathy put together a playlist for her friends. I listened to it and felt embraced, comforted, as if it were raining outside and she provided me warmth. I told her it sounded like a playlist for healing and she admitted that it was.
I've been thinking about healing the past few months, not really because I'm so broken and need to be healed, but because of this playlist. Music is such a strong medium that really brings back memories, so strong that I swear, I experience the exact same ranges of emotion when I hear particular songs. I've been broken before—by relationships, by lost career opportunities, by sprained ankles at the height of my dance career—and I've been healed by music. Similarly, there are songs that remind me of the hurt and suffering, that send me weeping uncontrollably by making me re-experience all that hurt and suffering again, but who wants a playlist of that?
This is my own playlist of healing, which I think is a great soundtrack to last week's three typhoons coming one after the other. It's not Kathy's healing playlist, I made my own. You can too, if you want.
1. Here's Where The Story Ends, The Sundays
and i cynically, cynically say the world is that way,
surprise, surprise, surprise...
It's tremendous how this song keeps coming back to comfort me. While the lyrics are obviously about closure (title pa lang, ulam na), the music itself and the way Harriet Wheeler sings really cheer you up in a so non-cheesy way. As in, there's a lot of hope from start to end. It's the song you want to end a good relationship on, despite all the bad feeling that comes with ending any relationship. I'm talking about those relationships that have changed who you are, the ones that may have given you the most heartbreak but which you would never wish had never happened, if you had the chance. Instead, you take a deep breath and go on.
2. Love Will Come To You, Indigo Girls
i'm always closing my eyes and wishing i'm fine
even though i know i'm not this time
Okay, this is a half-way healing song, which is why I put this, and the Sundays, at the start of the list. But the intent is there. A friend of mine has this song on her list of healing music as well. Kitch was the one to turn me on to it, and we both sang it as a mantra for a good deal of 2001. And love did come to us. It's almost cosmic.
3. Paglisan, Color It Red
kung ang lahat ay may katapusan
itong paglalakbay ay makakarating rin sa paroroonan...
Color It Red first caught my attention with their lusty "Hand Painted Sky," and of course later, I had to sing along with "Paglisan" as you could hear it all over the place. But when you listen to it, it's more than just a pop song that's played on the radio, there's so much depth to it, which is of course why Cooky Chua is now immortal.
4. Pudgy, Fatal Posporos
you and i are the pictures running through my head
you and i are the memories that will never go dead
everything that ever mattered, you said
This song was on Kathy's June playlist and I'm putting it on my own, too. It was what clued me in that the theme was healing. Bassist Donna Macalinao Diez wrote the song for an actual guy; I picture him to be the boy-next-door, or the guy who sits beside you in Music History class, whom you can talk to all day, who gives you rides to Philcoa, who will forever be that guy you loved in college and later falls in love with someone else. We all have a Pudgy of our own, I believe. "Pudgy" is the song that lets us remember him fondly.
5. Southern Cross, Crosby, Stills and Nash
so i'm sailing, for tomorrow my dreams are dying
and i've got my love tied to me, tied with a silver chain
i've got my ship and all my flags are flying
she's all that i have left and music is her name
There's a story in this song. The guy is on a voyage to the Southern Cross to look for the love of his life, who left him. His first verses map out his route, his first refrain explains why he's on this expedition ("What heaven brought you and me cannot be forgotten") and the chorus is determined to find that love because, who knows, love can endure. After a few more verses, he finds he is just sailing, because some loves just don't want to be found. And he tells her, "Somebody fine is gonna come along and make me forget about loving you..." This song made me believe that you can get over really great loves. It happened to Crosby, Stills and Nash, and it happened to me.
6. Landslide, Fleetwood Mac, Smashing Pumpkins, Dixie Chicks
i've been afraid of changing 'cause i built my life around you
but time makes you bolder, children get older
i'm getting older too
Since I'm from that 90s grunge era, I first heard the Smashing Pumpkins version of "Landslide," which is terribly dark blue from head to foot. I acknowledged its beauty even then, but only felt its healing power when the Dixie Chicks covered it. As you may know, theirs is an upbeat version, with voicings and the lead Dixie Chick stretching the last syllable of the last word of each verse with her Southern drawl. But they succeed in making it an optimistic song, and you do believe that you can sail through the changing ocean tides and handle the seasons of your life. Oh (with voicings)...
7. Common Cold, The Purplechickens
well, come to me, i'll see you disgraced
welcome to me, you were a name and a face
come back to me, waltzing with grace
but find yourself another one...
It's not as big a hit as "Ars Terror" or "Dream Systems," but I always thought this was one of the Manox's best crafted songs, with the ubiquitous clever lyric construction, such as "Take me back to a time when we mourned, laughing hard..." and the use of "Lover," to end the chorus and start the next verse but on different thoughts. And then, there's the roller coaster ride it takes you on. It's a song about knowing you must let go of somebody who abuses you, and the hope that it will all suddenly change, somehow. Sadder too that singer/songwriter Aldus Santos wrote this as his closure for the same fast walker he wrote "Ars Terror" for.
8. Crazy, Tori Amos
so i let crazy take a spin, and i let crazy settle in
kicked off my shoes, shut reason out
he said, 'first let's just unzip your religion down...'
I know you're not supposed to get over a guy by starting something with another guy, and I have no justifications for flirting with a much younger boy at the tail end of a traumatizing relationship with a much older man, unless I can say this song made me do it. As you can glean from the title, what I was doing back then was crazy, but some things happen for a reason, and I discovered this song at an absolutely perfect time, because I knew it was crazy but I did need someone to unzip my religion down, as it were. And, astonishingly, the end of that affair was exactly how the song ended: "And as soon as you have rearranged the mess in your head, he will show up looking sane, perfectly sane, if I know Crazy."
9. Vanilla, Helen
simple as rain falling on the ground
the world needs ice cream to calm it down...
This song isn't going to be on Helen's upcoming debut album, because their sound has evolved too far from what they originally sounded like. You know, when a band's been around long enough that they've changed their style? Some may argue that it has the same influences as bassist Jon Jose's previous band A Murder of Crows (from where Paramita's Ria also originated); the new set of songs are darker, more sinister and will require songs of healing after they're through with you. Anyway, I include this song in my playlist because Jon wrote the song for the way a former love made him feel—that no matter what hassles or problems he's having, seeing her takes them all away. And when you listen to the song (some of you may harass them to put it on their MySpace page, at least for posterity), that's exactly how it feels.
10. Granny, Dave Matthews Band
we find love, it's hiding there in the shadows in the darkness
maybe you and I could bring it to the light...
I can't pretend that I know who Dave Matthews is referring to, but some songs are best appreciated according to listeners' preferences, so I shall apply that here. I hope Granny doesn't mind, but this song has always resonated with me, for the simple reason that I spent a lot of my adult life hiding what I felt for particular people. I read somewhere that we have to be vulnerable to love, which is why not a lot of people actually love as greatly as they can, because they're too afraid of being hurt. That is what this song, in a nutshell, means to me. It is the song that encouraged me to have more courage to love, never mind if in the end my heart will be in a thousand pieces, as the song goes. In that way, it has healed me tremendously.
