The Most Beautiful Song About Being Depressed Ever

Go ahead, push you luck, find out how much love the world can hold,
Once upon a time I had control, and reigned my soul in tight.
Well the whole truth, it's like the story of a wave unfurled,
But I held the evil of the world,
So I stopped the tide,
froze it up from inside,
And it felt like a winter machine that you go through and then,
You catch your breath and winter starts again,
And everyone else is spring bound.

And when I chose to live, there was no joy,
it's just a line I crossed,
It wasn't worth the pain my death would cost,
So I was not lost or found.
And if I was to sleep, I knew my family had more truth to tell.
And so I traveled down a whispering well,
To know myself through them.

Growing up, my mom had a room full of books, and hid away in there,
Her father raging down a spiral stair,
Till he found someone, most days his son,
And sometimes I think my father, too, was a refugee,
I know they tried to keep their pain form me,
They could not see what it was for.
But now I'm sleeping fine,
Sometimes the truth is like a second chance,
I am the daughter of a great romance,
And they are the children of the war.

Well the sun rose with so many colors,
it nearly broke my heart,
It worked me over like a work of art,
And I was a part off all that.
So go ahead, push your luck, say what it is you gotta say to me,
We will push on into that mystery,
And it'll push right back, and there are worse things than that,
Cause for every price, and every penance that I
could think of,
It's better to have fallen in love,
Than never to have fallen at all,
Cause when you live in a world,
well it gets into who you thought you'd be,
And now I laugh at how the world changed me,
I think life chose me
after all.

Dar Williams, songstress extraordinaire. From her The Green World cd, 2000. I couldn't listen to this song then, without weeping, and many days I couldn't listen to it at all. My husband was furious, but it wasn't about not loving the music. I think it's a measure of how much 'better' I am that I can listen to this song so happily, even eagerly now.

I'm not sure about the line breaks, but that's kind of the way it is in a Dar song.

Music and the Brain

There is so much amazing work in the world. At the Institute for Music and Brain Science a wide variety of people study music and the brain from different perspectives. Hearing Healing & Helping Through Music is their motto. What could be better! I love their logo, too. So 'brainy'. Even their url: brainmusic. I always knew my brain had its own songs to sing, if I could only figure out how to hear them. (And, no, this is not the same as the ringing in my ears.)

The Center for Arts, Science and Technology at Stanford is hosting a talk this month with a speaker from the brainmusic people. Of course their url is brainwaves! I hope they don't mind my reposting their information here. Nobody knows about my blog anyway, so nobody will even see it! But, hey, nobody, try and go. I'll see you there.

February 8, 2010 - 5:30 PM

"Neurobiological Foundations for the Theory of Harmony in Western Tonal Music"

Mark Tramo MD, Ph.D.
Director, The Institute for Music & Brain Science
Associate Professor of Neurology, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Adjunct Professor of Music, Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA
Faculty Fellow, Harvard University Mind Brain & Behavior Interfaculty Initiative
Research Affiliate, M.I.T. Research Laboratory of Electronics
ASCAP/NARAS
www.BrainMusic.org

March 1, 2010 - 5:30 PM

"Music, Memories, and the Brain"

A talk exploring music-evoked autobiographical memories and associated emotions

Petr Janata, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, UC Davis Psychology Department Center for Mind and Brain

Music-evoked autobiographical memories and associated emotions are poignant examples of how music engages the brain. Janata binds music theory, cognitive psychology, and computational modeling to generate intuitive animations of music moving about in tonal space (the system of major and minor keys). He then shows how the unique tonal movements of individual excerpts of popular music can be used in conjunction with neuroimaging experiments to identify brain networks that support the experiencing of memories and emotions evoked by the music.