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Keane week on One Week // One Band, TWLOHA, and depression

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As described in this post from back in April, I have been working on a series of articles about a particular band during my takeover of a Web site called One Week // One Band. I had been thinking about contributing for some time, but I didn’t sit down and starting drawing up an outline until I was on my way to Austin by plane for SXSW 2015. Due to many factors including extenuating circumstances in my department at work in April, physical and mental exhaustion, and preparing to go to England and Ireland to cover music festivals and shows in May, I ended up getting delayed with my writing and had to ask OWOB editor Hendrik if I could have more time. I thank him a whole lot for being so flexible. I knew I really wanted to do a good job with and be proud of the content I would share with the world, and I couldn’t when I wasn’t in an inspired state to write.

I find it strangely coincidental that during my time of listening and relistening to Keane songs I had known so well for this project, I found myself in a bad place emotionally and actually really and truly needed Keane there for me right then. There wasn’t a particular stressor or trigger; things in my life have just snowballed and some incidents on my trip acted like a slap in the face, and in rapid succession. Perhaps it was when I had finally boarded my very delayed flight back to Washington and watched the film ‘version’ of To Write Love on Her Arms (TWLOHA) that my body at last decided to respond to this wakeup call. Had I been anywhere else but in an airplane over the Atlantic, I would have been freaking out, shaking wildly, pacing back and forth. Instead, I excused myself to one of the lavatories and just stayed in there, sobbing for over 15 minutes, blowing my nose, and wiping my eyes until I felt I could emerge and pass myself off as normal.

Right. Normal. Something most people pull off effortlessly every day, and yet on this Sunday afternoon, I couldn’t.

On a nighttime run this past week, I thought about a time some years ago when I was in the office kitchen, waiting in line to use the sink to wash my hands. Two of my coworkers were chatting. I remember the moment vividly, because I’d walked into the room as one of them said to the other that he couldn’t understand how someone could ever feel so bad and hopeless about his life that he would be driven to kill himself. He went to say to the other woman, “it’s unbelievable, I just don’t know anyone who is depressed!” He even laughed about it to her.

What? You’ve never met anyone who has depression? I almost turned around to leave. But I said silently to myself, “no. Stay. You can get through this. They’ll leave the room, and you’ll be fine.”

I sucked in my breath quickly and quietly to prevent myself from gasping. I couldn’t believe what I just heard. Wow, you really have no idea, do you?

That’s the thing about people who have depression. Unless we are physically incapable of getting out of bed and going to work, we look, sound, and generally act like everyone else. Because even on bad days – especially the bad days – we make an extra effort to hide how we feel. These comments I heard at work were not only hurtful to me personally but to each and every person who has struggled with their own battle with mental illness. Trivializing someone’s own struggles or worse, blaming the person for not seeking help fast enough as what happened in the case of the suicide of Robin Williams, just goes to show how ignorant modern society is about mental illness and how it can affect just about anyone.

Anyone. Young or old. Male or female. Rich or poor. With a job or without one. Any race, color, or religion. Depression doesn’t discriminate.

People who have depression have it for their whole lives. Although our lives are a sea of good days mixed in with the bad, and the ratio of the two varies over time, often it’s difficult to make other people see and understand that our struggle isn’t like a switch you can turn on and off easily. Taking medication or seeing a medical professional certainly helps to get you of the dark places you’ve been stuck in, but even with assistance, there are invisible scars under the surface everyone else can’t see.

Music is very therapeutic to me for one very good reason: I don’t need anyone else when I decide to invoke it to help me when I need it. I’ve not had an easy life. Just in the last 5 years, I have been betrayed, left behind, and had my heart broken numerous times. But music has been the one constant even when the people I loved and cared about the most decided to write me out of their lives. I hope this importance of music to me is evident through my week of writing about Keane, even if I don’t go into my personal life on each and every post.

Something I find very special about Keane is that although Tim Rice-Oxley doesn’t avoid talking about sad situations like breakups and broken hearts, overall there is still a lot of positivity, forward thinking, hope, and light in Keane’s songs. It’s easy to write a slow sad song that is nothing but blackness and shadows. It’s much more difficult to write a sad song with an upbeat tempo that makes the listener think of different ideas and outcomes for him/herself. That’s what Tim is able to do and better than anyone else.

‘Sea Fog’ from their fourth album ‘Strangeland,’ for example, sounds mournful because the protagonist has had to come to accept that this journey with his loved one has come to an end. But this acceptance is parallel to the acceptance that this is fate, that everything happens for a reason. And things do happen for a reason. I feel very sure of that. It’s just very hard to see the sun behind the fog when all you’re surrounded by is grey and darkness, to have enough faith that there’s a day on the other side of the night.

I could have given up so many times. But I’m still here. The music I love, including Keane’s, have played a huge part in making sure that I am.

You can read all my posts on Keane on One Week // One Band in chronological order through here.

You’ve got time to realise you’re shielded by the hands of love.

An old lady dives into Tumblr

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Just in case you missed the unveiling of my big writing project last week, don’t fret. You’re in luck. The entire week of my writing about Keane – all 30 posts plus an introductory note by editor Hendrik – is available in chronological order through this link at One Week // One Band. It was quite a labour of love, so I’d appreciate your feedback, and as that ol’ chestnut goes, sharing is caring! I’d like to get my writing out to a wider audience, so Tumblr / Facebook / Twitter / Google+ / sharing, anything you can do to help me, is love. Thanks.

Keane - from Mmusicmag

In order to participate, I needed to sign up for my own Tumblr account and learn the quirks of the system in a few short weeks. These days, it appears most young people have a Tumblr. A good number of bands have them as well, and I’ve seen them been used to varying success. Content, as is true for all social media platforms, is king, followed by directing the right kind of content to your target audience as the queen. To be fair, I haven’t really gotten the hang of the format of the social media platform yet. I’m also still pondering the actual utility of the site to share media and stories beyond in the moment and whether I’d actually use it regularly. If you want to add me / compliment me / talk to me on matters other than Music in Notes and/or you need another outlet to harass me on (I’m kidding, be civil!), you’re welcome to do it over on my Tumblr.

It’s kind of like the long form version of Twitter: you repost content from other people’s Tumblr to share with your followers, although even with the platform giving you the opportunity to comment or add your own notes to a previous poster’s photo or post, most people can’t be bothered to. From what I gather, most people who use Tumblr have short attention spans and want to look at pretty or sexual (ew, seriously, I don’t need to see that!) pictures and not have to comment, collecting them like virtual baseball cards. There must be a way to go back through your own archive (I hope so, anyway), but if a teenage girl or boy is just reblogging and reblogging hundreds of posts he/she likes in one evening, doesn’t it all become white noise? How can you ever really remember that photo or quote someone else said that caught your attention for about 5 seconds of your life?

This is the kind of trend that worries me a lot about the future of music journalism. We just learned last week that NME will be going to a free print edition in September. One can’t help but put two and two together that the three main reasons for the decline of a once storied music magazine are 1) the internet, 2) people couldn’t be bothered to go out and pay for the content, and 3) even if they did, I think it’s unlikely the magazine would have held their attention for all that long. I’m not blaming or shaming NME as an oddity, the whole journalism world has been shaken up by the internet. (When SPIN went online only in 2012, I felt as though I was dying.) Some of you may think this is all very funny, but if you’re a writer like me, all of this is a very, very scary thing to contemplate if you’re planning to make a living in this business.

But back to Tumblr. I have to admit that once I started racking up likes, I was curious to see what kind of music fan was liking or reblogging my content, so I’d click on a username and be whisked off to their site. My heart sunk a little when someone commented early on that she thought my recounting of seeing Keane at my first SXSW in 2012 was considered “too long.” Judge for yourself. I thought the whole point of the site was to write how the music makes you feel and why it’s important? Personally, I can’t do that in a paragraph and still do it well. That’s why one-paragraph reviews of an album make me shudder. (Then again, it was probably the subject matter. I had a flick through on some popular posts on Lorde and One Direction, all of which received likes in the hundreds, and those posts went on and on. Readers had no issues with the length of those posts.)

So that comment bothered me. But maybe I’m just old, ha! Microsoft Word tells me this is close to 800 words already, so I will stop while I’m ahead (no, really) and wait for the next post to tell you more about my takeover week.