Free Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life by Steve Almond

up dropping acid, then climbing into the bathtub with Mike and me, despite being fully clothed. More than any particular moment, though, what I remember of that place is the song “American Pie,” which was always playing and to which people were always singing along. I didn’t understand certain words—What was a levee? How could one drink rye?—but I got that it was a story about saying good-bye to something lovely and doomed. It was the moment, so common in American social movements, when a dispiriting present gives way to nostalgia. There must have been other songs playing (this was 1971 after all) but I was fouryears old and this was the one I needed to make sense of what was happening around me.
    I’ve always been drawn to songs that make me feel bad and that make feeling bad feel good. These songs—Depression Songs—allow us to slough the small emotions that compose our defense mechanisms for the large emotions that make us feel genuinely alive. They convert self-pity into sorrow, anxiety into fear, grievance into grief.
    To clarify: Depression Songs don’t make people depressed. They articulate a preexisting depression and, when they’re really cooking, they
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that depression. They offer tremendous relief to those of us otherwise prone to wallowing. Nearly all the songs I return to, the ones that have come to represent entire eras of my life, are Depression Songs. Everybody has his or her own set list, because the main ingredient in the construction of a Depression Song is you, the depressed listener.
    If you play the song “Nothing Compares 2 U” by Sinéad O’Connor, for instance, my wife is instantly transported back to 1990, managing the cosmetics section at CVS, a shy fifteen-year-old mooning over one in a series of mulleted cads to whom she had pledged undying love. It’s all there: the knot in her throat, the heavy bands of blue eye shadow, the mocking promises on the glass bottles of nail polish it was her job to shelve.
    My time-equivalent Depression Song—I confess this with little pride—is “Never Tear Us Apart” by INXS, which you might remember as the one with the video where the comely lead singer Michael Hutchence wanders morosely around Prague and then, right at the end, accidentally hangs himself while masturbating. It’s an addictive soul song built around synths, a quartet of plucked guitar notes, and various dramatic pauses. The vocals are overwrought in the best way. Hutchence tells his lover that they could live for “a thousand years/But if I hurt you I make wine from your tears,” and rather than questioning how that would work, or how such a wine might taste, or what, exactly, it would mean that you might want to use the tears ofyour lover to make an alcoholic beverage, my intuitive reaction is to think, That is just
heavy
. This was certainly what I was thinking as I staggered across the soggy lawns of my college campus, having just enjoyed a one-night stand that I assumed would last for a thousand years and produce oceans of Chardonnay. My inamorata had a slightly different take. She cringed when she saw me the next day. We were not going to last a thousand years. We had barely lasted a thousand seconds.
    And then there’s the song “Hello, Mary” by David Baerwald. The melody alone is enough to put me on a crying jag, but the part that slays me is three minutes in, when the hero, who’s been talking to an old lover, trying to play things cool, suddenly blurts out, “I was looking at a picture, it was me and you, I think it was 1982, and you were sitting on my lap and my hand was on your breast and we were staring into each other’s eyes” and on this last word his voice rises into a helpless falsetto and you realize that, though he’s not in love with her, he’s still in love with that moment of loving her and he’ll never be rid of that feeling. That I was obsessed with “Hello, Mary” throughout my first failed love affair did not dawn on me as