Album Therapy
Aural pleasure: once recreational, now medicinal
A visit to a mental health professional is usually fifty or so minutes. The running time of the average album is about the same. Coincidence? Probably, but I find the similarity striking, especially as I’ve recently rediscovered not only the pleasures of album listening, but also some deep psychological benefits.
What once was recreational is now medicinal.
I’ve become a bit evangelical about it. Especially as I learn most folks rarely listen to albums as albums anymore. Meanwhile, rates of depression and anxiety are skyrocketing. Coincidence? Probably. But maybe not.
Until recently, I, too, had mostly forgone album listening. Without realizing it, as the digital age took hold over the last three decades, I gradually stopped indulging in regular “full album listening.” I went from enjoying records to making mix CDs, to curating playlists and listening to podcasts, usually in increments. I was in control of the listening experience, and a little addicted to that control. But as I’ve restored album listening to my days, I’ve tapped back into a cobwebby part of my mind that, when properly activated by a collection of connected songs, offers a distinct, therapeutic pleasure.
And not a moment too soon.
GUIDELINES
For best results, one should endeavor not to multitask while listening to an album. As in therapy and/or meditation, you abandon your phone, you sit, or you lie down. You transfer control to the artist’s/band’s work, in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the creator(s) have painstakingly sequenced songs to evoke a particular response, like chapters in a book, or scenes in a play or film. It’s a place you go.
Perhaps you indulge in some kind of intoxicant while listening/surrendering. That is fine, especially if it helps you let go. Listening with a companion (or two, or three) can be sweet indeed, deeply bonding. Sharing a solely aural experience is highly underrated.
If you absolutely must listen while driving, fine. It still works, especially with highway driving. I was recently reintroduced to the genius of both Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush (34:32) and Bowie’s Blackstar (41:14) while driving. As I successfully piloted my Subaru down I-95, I was significantly awed. Or rather, re-awed.
That’s the key word: awe. Therapeutic awe. Unquantifiable awe. It doesn’t happen instantly, though. It comes on by degrees, usually culminating after the final fade out, blooming inside you like a flower, in its own time.
How could I have forgotten these feelings of being seen, understood, released from my timeline? I have been seduced by convenience, by the illusion of control, by flashy, shiny things.
More and more, our culture is driven by images, by sight. Humans have never before been so inundated with pictures, video, and text. We’re not wired for this commonplace deluge. We are exhausted, most of us unawares as we mindlessly doomscroll, blowing out our dopamine receptors, ruining our eyes. The resulting exhaustion creates and/or exacerbates ill mental health. I know whereof I speak.
In terms of development, sight is our “youngest” sense, the least reliable (especially in my case). In utero, eyesight is the last to develop, whereas hearing is functional in the womb as early as thirteen weeks. Hearing is also the last sense to go when we die. It is deep, deep within the brain.
Evolutionarily speaking, the thing you’re doing at this moment – reading text – is also new, and, like sight, buggy. We came down from the trees about 500,000 years ago, and we’ve been talking, singing, telling stories, and, more to the point, listening since then. The earliest known writings, by contrast, are dated 3,400 BCE. Until about the 15th century, most folks remained illiterate, processing and retaining vast amounts of information aurally.
We can still do that. We can, and we should.
As a teacher of guitar and bass who instructs by ear, I find most students vastly underestimate their hearing, the connections between the sonic processing areas of their brains, and their hands. I counsel them to practice with their eyes closed, to make chords, play bass lines, etc., blind. They initially find this absurd. Most, however, discover they require eyesight less than they think, and are amazed at the power of their underutilized ears.
The notion of Album Therapy dawned on me during a recent two-day solo drive from the Catskills to Georgia. As temps rose, and accents thickened, I re-listened to the entire Led Zeppelin catalog in chronological order. Eight albums, all under an hour. Four per day. I was legit astonished at how great the first six remain (before hard drugs, copious alcohol, and tragedy became an integral part of the LZ saga, and marred their latter-day work). I’d feared the music would not move me as it once did. I needn’t have worried. In some ways, it moves me more now. It certainly occupied a lot of my consciousness – and pleasantly so – for hours.
As I recently wrote about Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers’ work: “ …the good stuff from the past not only takes you back, it meets you wherever you are, and clarifies some aspect of your present life. A truly great work evokes more than mere nostalgia.”
Speaking of nostalgia, lest we get mired in the tedious notion of “bygone days were better,” let me say: the album need not be a so-called “classic” of yore. A quick glance of several “Best Albums of 2024” lists (Pitchfork, Stereogum, NPR, et al) reveals most young artists (CharliXCX, Billie Eilish, BossMan Dlow) still adhere to the “under an hour” album time limit. With digital platforms, artists can make an album as long as they want (I see you, Taylor Swift; I see you, Beyonce), yet many choose to stick to the time restrictions set down in the late 40s, when the 12-inch LP, on which about 50 minutes of “hi fidelity” sound could be compressed, began its ascent to temporary dominance. (Many credit Frank Sinatra with inventing the “concept album,” i.e. a collection of themed songs, rather than a compilation of unrelated pieces.)
My Gen X formative years – the 70s and 80s – comprised the golden age of the album art form, when, due to a blessed lack of options, I spent untold hours listening to LPs from beginning to end, both alone and with others, absorbing the nonlinear stories, the warp and weft of the creators’ sonic visions, traversing inner landscapes they mapped for me, landscapes that remain. My mother’s records spun all throughout my early childhood, and luckily, she had good taste: The Beatles, Janis, CSNY, Simon & Garfunkel, Dylan, the soundtracks to Woodstock, Hair, and Jesus Christ Superstar.
Several albums significantly shaped my life, forged and enriched relationships. Listening to Murmur and Boy with my best friend, English Settlement and 1999 with my girlfriend, over and over and over. I learned to play music by repeatedly listening to LPs. But for albums, I do not know who I would be.
Lastly, I recommend listening to a flawed work.
Most people cite their “perfect albums” (IMHO, FWIW: Rumours, Pretenders I, Blood on the Tracks, What’s Going On, Pet Sounds, After the Gold Rush, Blue, A Love Supreme, Born to Run…yes I AM AN ELDER). Much more common is the album with one or two clunkers. ( The irritating “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight” on R.E.M.’s otherwise perfect, 42-minute-long Automatic for the People; the awkward “The Crunge” on Zeppelin’s otherwise masterful, 41-minute-long Houses of the Holy; the awful “Jazz Police” on Leonard Cohen’s otherwise stellar 41-minute-long I’m Your Man.) With LPs, it’s labor intensive and potentially damaging to get up, painstakingly lift the stylus, and move it to the next song. With cassettes, fast-forwarding is also a hassle. So you just let the lame song play out, thankful it is finite. You endure, you forgive, you accept the bad with the good. With digital – which is how the vast majority of you will indulge, if you do – it’s easier to banish a subpar tune with a tap of the finger, or via a demand to Siri, etc. I advise against that. Keep your hands to yourself. Stop talking.
As the saying goes, “may our sorrows carve room for our joys.” In other words, the great stuff shines ever brighter when placed alongside the objectionable, the easily maligned. Let it go. Be uncomfortable and inconvenienced with the cringeworthy for a few minutes, then be lifted again.
I retain vivid childhood memories of enduring songs on my mom’s albums that made me uneasy or vexed: “Glass Onion,” “I Am the Walrus,” “Gethsemane,” (from Jesus Christ Superstar), “Don’t Put it Down” and “Initials (LBJ)” (from Hair). The discomfort enhanced the experience.
You don’t need me to tell you Album Therapy will not cure your ills. It certainly will not. But it can offer delicious reprieve, a lot of bang for your buck. If you’ve strayed from indulging in an album, or if you’ve never done it at all, please give it a try and let me know in the comments how it goes. Or, if you’re already an avid, therapeutic album listener, please weigh in. Suggestions welcome.
Whatever the case, may the under-an-hour experience revivify, salve, inspire, and/or transport you to a place deep within, beyond all troubles outside the window, or on the screen, if only for approximately 3/4s on an hour.
As they say in therapy: “We have to finish now.”
Amen! "Once recreational, now medicinal" is basically my life now. Thanks so much for this—you've given voice to a throughline of my musical thinking. It all points toward our need to become better listeners in general. But I must respectfully disagree about "The Crunge." I'm a sucker for funk in any form—even if attempted by Led Zep!
Yet another reason to be grateful I grew up in an era where album listening was commonplace. I'll never forget my parents' stereo console and the artists whose albums were played -- all of us together at their cocktail hour which was when they'd play the records. This week while decorating my house for Christmas I listened to several Leonard Cohen albums in their entirety via AirPods. It was meditative.