When Music Remembers More Than I Do

Naomi Waxman

When I talk to my friends about their relationship with music, a lot of them give a similar answer—music truly makes them feel. Whether that feeling is enlightened, tragic, nostalgic, or best described by another suitably dramatic adjective, really depends on the person. Personally, I strongly associate music with experiences that I’ve had. When I listen to those songs now, I either feel nostalgic and think back on how much fun I had, or, quite frankly, never want to hear them again because of the negative or overwhelming emotions they conjure. For me, an experience that stirred especially intense emotions was performing at the Sydney Opera House in 2023. 

That point in the year when you first meet everyone in your class always stands out to me. Sure, meeting new people is pretty scary and stuff, but I’m mostly just really nosy about everyone’s “one fun fact.” In my head, I’m always like, “Psssh, you have a cute dog…Well, wait till you hear my fact!”

Hearing someone say they performed at the Sydney Opera House as their trivial fun fact isn’t something you hear every day. From an outside perspective, it may sound like a brag. And to be honest, it is—when I tell people, they’re usually in disbelief. Performing at a venue like that is something I can talk about forever.

However, performing at the Sydney Opera House also came with an entire week in Sydney with my school choir—going to the zoo, walking along Bondi Beach, exploring the city malls, and eating really yummy food. But, 2023 was also the first time I truly experienced depression. No matter how hard I tried to enjoy the activities we did, I found it impossible not to feel exhausted. Beyond the physical exhaustion of our packed schedule and getting only about six hours of sleep each night, I was even more depleted mentally. By that point, depression had engulfed me.

Depression is commonly defined as a serious mental disorder that negatively affects how a person feels, thinks, acts, and perceives the world. It can be characterised in many ways, including sadness, irritability, feelings of worthlessness, sleeping too little or too much, and suicidal ideation. One aspect of depression that I rarely hear discussed, however, is the loss of enjoyment in experiences and activities that would ordinarily excite you more than anything.

On paper, performing at the Opera House should have been one of the highlights of my high school years. Instead, I felt detached, like I was watching myself from above the entire time, pretending to play the role of someone enjoying the experience. I remember standing among my friends as they took photos outside the Opera House, at the zoo, and in the restaurants where we’d eat. It felt as though I were watching them through an imaginary pane of glass. I knew I should have been happy when we talked about the days ahead, but instead of feeling grateful and excited, I couldn’t shake the desire to go home. One of my friends at the time made up a bit where she said, in the middle of the trip, “tomorrow we can say tomorrow we can say tomorrow we can say we go home.” I think about it often now, because it captures exactly how I felt. It also comforts me knowing I possibly wasn’t the only one going through a difficult time.

No matter how hard I tried to convince myself to enjoy the experience, I couldn't seem to access those emotions. They felt like oobleck; the harder I pushed against them, the more solid and immovable they became. Any excitement I managed to feel would quickly dissolve, slipping away until I was left with the same stubborn emptiness as before.

This is where listening to music comes in. During this period, I was really interested in  making playlists for each month, and July was the playlist tied to the choir trip. The term I would now use to describe my relationship with that playlist is “coping mechanism.” More specifically, coping strategies can be divided into four broad categories, and for me listening to music falls under “emotion-focused” coping (NIH).” Emotion-focused coping aims to reduce the negative emotions associated with a problem, and music can be one way of doing that. The way I see it, listening to this playlist was a tool to regulate my emotions—a bridge that helped me adapt to the unfamiliar environment that I was living in for a week. 

My friend Hugo feels similarly. He and I have both found ourselves in environments that were unenjoyable because they were either overwhelming, boring, or simply too much. He told me that, for him, there are songs that grew old or unlistenable because he played them while working full-time over the summer; now, they remind him only of that boring period.. For me, it’s similar. Now, when I listen to songs I had on repeat during the choir trip—particularly old Sabrina Carpenter—I feel wistful for a time I wish I had enjoyed more but I couldn’t because I was depressed. 

That brings me to another aspect of experiencing depression in daily life that I think is often overlooked: on the outside, nothing appears to be wrong. In Australia, I still attended rehearsals, boarded the plane, and participated in performances. To everyone else, I was functioning normally. I made TikToks outside the Opera House just as everyone else did, and I joked and laughed with my friends, almost as though I was trying to mask my feelings. But underneath it all, I was exhausted—not just physically, but also from pretending to be happy and forcing myself to be present. For me, this trip became a clear example of how depression can take away not only your happiness but also your ability to connect with moments that should bring joy. 

So, what does all of this mean for music? Before this trip, I probably would have described music as something you listen to simply because it sounds good. But, looking back, I realise that it has always done much more than that. Music became the thread that connected my emotions to moments in time. It transformed an ordinary playlist into something I still struggle to listen to years later because it carries the weight of memories I can't separate from the songs themselves.

In another course I took last trimester, I wrote about the motif of a windmill and encountered  the idea of oscillatory entrainment, the process by which two independent rhythms gradually synchronise with one another. I can't help thinking that music and emotion work in a similar way; the rhythm of a song and the rhythm of our emotional lives seem to fall into step, until hearing just a few notes is enough to bring an entire experience rushing back.

So, for me, music is never just background noise. It preserves emotions long after the moment has passed, whether those emotions are joy, pain, or somewhere in between. Years later, I can still hear those songs and be immediately transported back to Sydney—not just to the Opera House or the beaches, but to the version of myself who couldn't enjoy any of it. I used to wish those songs didn't remind me of that time, but now I think that's part of what makes music so powerful. It doesn't merely soundtrack our lives; it documents them. Looking back, the playlist I made wasn't just a collection of songs—it became a record of who I was at that point in my life.