During my lowest period in New York, almost the only thing I found consoling was watching music videos on YouTube, curled on the sofa with my headphones on, listening again and again to the same voices finding the register for their distress.
— Olivia Laing, The Lonely City
I return to this quote often when thinking about loneliness. During my loneliest moments, when loneliness could morph into literal pain, music seemed to be the only thing that provided comfort and relief.
Take, for instance, the time I curled up in front of my radiator during a COVID-19 lockdown. I felt so much coldness and such lack of human warmth that I struggled to fall asleep that night. I tried meditating, I tried brewing some tea, I tried going for a walk — but none of that worked. It wasn’t until I listened to Ludovico Einaudi’s Svanire on repeat that I could finally find some rest and — slowly but surely — drift off into the night.
Even when the only feeling that emerged through loneliness was indefinable numbness, music could break my emotional boulders into fine rocks. Songs and sounds have the ability to make the unseen seen, the unheard heard, and the unfelt felt.
With that in mind, here’s a collection of songs that soothed my loneliness throughout the years — and how we can apply the science of music therapy to feel less lonely.
Track 1: Somebody Else
When I was in high school — a time when every emotional experience felt dramatic — I had an intense crush on this one girl. I struggled to get close to her, but one day, I got invited to a party where I knew she would show up, too.
In the days leading up to the event, I racked my brain about what I might say to her. At first, I landed on That physics exam totally sucked, right? But eventually, I sided with asking her about the new alt-J album, which I knew was a common interest of ours.
The party took place in a dark basement. When she walked down the stairs, I acted as if I hadn’t seen her, so I could mentally prepare to make my big entrance. After an hour, I finally felt ready. But when I spotted her, the floor ceased feeling solid. I saw her making out with someone else.
I stepped outside and walked away from the blasting music until only the muffled sounds of the bass drum remained. Dum dum dum! Sitting on a cold rock, I desperately searched for an outlet for all the uncomfortable, indefinable emotions I was experiencing. Reflexively, I pulled out my phone and landed on my most recently saved song. Somebody Else by The 1975.
The track starts with a choir that sounds like it’s rushing by your ears. Shortly after, a few bell-like chords enter the soundscape. So I heard you found somebody else, Matty Healy sings, and at first I thought it was a lie.
The song was a resonator for my feelings. Particularly the chorus, when the song becomes more upbeat, spoke to me:
I don’t want your body
But I hate to think about you with somebody else
Our love has gone cold
You’re intertwining your soul with somebody else
Nobody seemed to miss me at the party in the basement. I felt invisible. But at the very least, I had this song, this voice, to guide me through the night. I sat on that rock for a felt eternity, listening to Somebody Else on repeat.
Interlude 1: How Music Soothes Loneliness
What is it about music and loneliness? What’s the connection between the two, and how does music help us feel more connected?
To recap, loneliness is the subjective experience of feeling disconnected — primarily from others but also from ourselves and the world around us. We can feel lonely when we’re with others just as much as when we’re physically alone. What’s more, loneliness is a cluster of emotions, incorporating many elusive feelings like anger, shame, jealousy, sorrow, and self-pity. And yet we also lose our ability to self-regulate emotions when we feel lonely. This effectively means we do the things we feel like doing (e.g., withdrawing) rather than the things we want to do (e.g., reaching out to others).
Loneliness is shapeless, in other words. It’s an unruly specter.
In this haunting environment, music can soothe loneliness in two major ways: emotional arrangement and virtual friendship.
Emotional arrangement
One magical element of music is that it provides structure. Songs compress the extremely fickle nature of emotions into something palpable, something we can sense. It’s not surprising, then, that many studies have found that music actually improves emotional regulation. Thus, music can counteract the shapelessness and impaired self-regulation we experience when feeling lonely.
Rhythm regulates the brain.
In this sense, music provides what we might call “emotional arrangement.” For instance, Somebody Else helped me structure my lonely emotions. Prior to the music, my inner life had felt like one big, messy ball of wool. But listening to this one song was as if someone had helped me untangle this woolen ball into neat strings.
Which brings us to the second soothing aspect of music.
Virtual friendships
Sounds and songs can conjure a virtual friend, an imaginary person we can turn to when we feel alone and misunderstood.
Researchers at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, say that music acts as a “social surrogate” for a friend. In one of their studies, Katharina Schäfer and her colleagues asked participants to visualize a tragic event, such as the death of their parents or the loss of their eyesight. Then, participants listened to self-selected music for twenty minutes. What Schäfer and her colleagues found was that participants showed a “significant reduction of loneliness” and a “relevant rise in empathy.”
Unsurprisingly, we often say that we feel understood by a song without really being able to pinpoint why. Similarly, it’s difficult to rationalize exactly why we’re friends with someone. It just feels right. “It is conceivable,” Schäfer and her colleagues say, “that listeners reported less loneliness due to a heightened sense of connection provided by the music.”
This connection comforts us. It makes us feel a sense of belonging.
When I listened to Somebody Else, I had never seen Matty Healy live. I didn’t know a thing about him. And yet, I felt so connected to his voice, his words, his composition — simply because we shared this strange experience of losing someone over somebody else. That night, the chords and lyrics of Somebody Else became my virtual friend.
Of course, virtual friendships are one-sided. We can’t really interact with the music like we can with flesh-made friends. But this could actually benefit us. Since there’s no interaction, there’s also no judgment and no probing. Sure, a tight hug and reassuring words feel nice. But sometimes — particularly when we feel lonely — we need an outlet for our uncomfortable emotions without the baggage of human interactions.
Tracks 2–4: Swimming in Circles
Many years after that “Somebody Else” night, I became obsessed with Mac Miller’s music. This was also around the time my grandfather passed away, when the pandemic took the world by storm, and when I parted ways with a person I deeply adored.
Loneliness became a different type of beast during that time. Back in high school, I had at least some friends I could talk to daily. But now I was constantly alone — and felt even more so. My days had a hollow and circular quality. Social interactions became empty. I felt like Sysiphus rolling a humongous rock up a hill, only to watch it roll down again. Looking back, it only makes sense that one of my favorite songs in this period was called Circles, in which Mac Miller sings:
It’s gettin’ pretty late, gettin’ pretty late
Damn, and I find
It goes around like the hands that keep countin’ the time
Drawin’ circles
Miller’s eponymous album, Circles, was released as a companion to his previous album, Swimming. The underlying message was Swimming in Circles, which at first sounded depressing to me but listening to it over and over again, there was also a strange kind of optimism to it. Especially the lyrics of Come Back to Earth comforted me:
In my own way, this feel like livin’
Some alternate reality
And I was drownin’, but now I’m swimmin’
Through stressful waters to relief
Miller’s swimming metaphor became my personal symbol of cheerful despair. Swimming in circles was the only thing that made sense to me back then — and it felt like an achievement because it meant that I kept my head up. I was fighting not to drown.
This gave me hope during a time when I viewed everything through a grey, tinted lens and when it felt like the world was going to end. I found comfort in the dissonant chords of Swimming in Circles. They kept me afloat.
One day, I had a small breakthrough. I was riding my bike through the city, listening to Surf, another song from Circles. Then, I heard Mac Miller sing:
Sometimes I feel lonely
Not when I’m alone
But it’s more when I’m standin’ in crowds
That I’m feeling most on my own
It was the first time I began to grasp the idea that loneliness and being alone could be two distinct concepts. Listening to Miller make this distinction, I felt heard and understood. I felt less alone in my loneliness and more comfortable in my aloneness. I had gained another virtual friend.
In the years to follow, when I would experience the loneliest period of my life, these lines from Swimming in Circles became a guiding light, a hand reaching out.
Interlude 2: How to Pick a Song to Feel Less Lonely
What music should we turn to when we feel lonely? And how should we listen to it?
The good news is that we needn’t adhere to a certain style of music. Schäfer and her colleagues say, for instance, that listening to comforting or distracting music doesn’t make a huge difference. In both cases, individuals tend to feel happier and less lonely in the moment. “Private music listening in general,” they say, “may lift the spirit and provide a sense of company.”
That said, there are a few things we can do to turn up the music’s emotional resonance.
The first thing we can do is match and move the mood. Most people naturally gravitate toward music that replicates their mood. And as we’ve seen, this can help us regulate emotions and feel less lonely. However, it could also perpetuate a lonely feeling. “While there are benefits to matching music to our mood,” says Molly Warren, a licensed music therapist, “it can potentially keep us stuck in a depressive, angry or anxious state.” So, once we feel comfortable to do so, it can be helpful to slowly shift the music to a different state.
How a certain type of music impacts us will naturally vary, but here’s a rough overview of moods associated with different genres:
- Classical music can calm us down by lowering blood pressure and heart rate.
- Metal and other heavy music can be an outlet for repressed emotions, like anger, and thus help us de-stress.
- Rap, by combining poetry with storytelling, can help us feel empowered, motivated, and understood.
- Pop and other upbeat music can energize us and even improve physical performance.
Another thing we can do is listen more closely to specific lyrics. In music therapy, this is known as lyric analysis. “Lyric analysis,” Warren says, “introduces a novel and less-threatening approach to process emotions, thoughts and experiences.” This could be as simple as writing out lyrics that resonate with us (just like I did throughout this article). To go one step further, we might ask ourselves a few questions, like, “Why does this particular line resonate with me?”, “How does the artist cope with the problem described in the song?” or “What’s an alternative way to express this sentiment?”.
Lastly, we can choose familiar music to evoke a stronger emotional response and let music act as a virtual friend. Songs you remember from childhood. Songs you connect with a hard-hitting movie. Songs you can play on an instrument. This is not to say that new music can’t immediately strike a chord within us. It can. But generally, familiar music allows for a deeper connection because we already know the rhythms, the lyrics, the message. Familiarity means security and belonging. Which is exactly what we need when we feel alienated. (As I’m writing this, I’m listening to my most listened songs of 2022, the loneliest year of my life. It feels like coming home.)
In any case, active listening—i.e., devoting our full attention to one song—is a vital condition for letting the magic of music unfold. It becomes much easier to connect to music when we don’t just let it hum in the background but involve our entire mental capacities. It’s only then that music can interact with feelings of loneliness, connecting mind and body and cushioning the free fall of loneliness.
Track 5: Sit Around the Fire
When I took the bus home from the beach, my skin still smelled like sand, salt, and sunscreen. I looked out of the window, watching the setting sun tint the world orange. It was a stark contrast: the external world was so beautiful, but internally, I felt abandoned.
A few months earlier I had moved to Portugal. After years of swimming in circles, I had craved a fresh start. And yet, I struggled to connect with people and so, I started to retreat. I was constantly wearing headphones, feeling stuck inside my own head, getting lost in thoughts.
But then, suddenly, a song shimmered through my headphones, snapping me right into my bus seat. I looked at my phone. The track was called Sit Around the Fire. The first chords sounded unfathomably divine. It was as if there were actual angels humming into my ears.
Soon, a muffled voiceover appeared. It sounded like an old voice recording, but it felt all the more touching, reassuring, and soothing.
It’s really time for you to see through the absurdity of your own predicament
You aren’t who you thought you were
You just aren’t that person
And in this very lifetime you can know it
Right now
The real work you have to do
Is in the privacy of your own heart
All of the external forms are lovely
But the real work
Is your inner connection
The bus turned around the corner, two stops away from my place, and I heard the line that would forever remain one of the most effective sources of comfort amidst feelings of loneliness:
Everything in you
That you don’t need
You can let go of
You don’t need loneliness
For you couldn’t possibly be alone
As I walked up the stairs to my apartment, that last line kept echoing through my skull. You don’t need loneliness, for you couldn’t possibly be alone.
It was exactly what I needed to hear at the time—a reminder that I wasn’t alone in whatever I was feeling. I wasn’t alone in my loneliness, so there was little ground to feel lonely in the first place.
Outro
During all the times I felt lonely throughout the years, there has always been a voice, a sound, a song to comfort me. I didn’t always stumble upon it immediately, but it came, eventually.
Somebody Else helped me with my loneliness of teenage heartbreak. Circles, Surf, and Coming Back to Earth guided me through a period of utter disorientation and depression. Sit Around the Fire showed me an alternative way to relate to my seemingly lonely reality. Svanire subdued the pain in my lowest periods.
Of course, none of these songs eradicated my loneliness forever. But that’s beside the point. The point is that, thanks to music, I started feeling at home in my homelessness. I started feeling connected with my loneliness.
Music has built a safe space for me: a large house with my favorite lyrics painted across the walls, plenty of rooms for all my virtual friends, and different floors that invite me to rage, relax, and retreat.
Whenever the storms of loneliness take me by surprise, I can find refuge in this house. I can remind myself that one song, one voice, one sound can be the spark that guides me through a dark, lonely night — and all the way to reconnection.