10 songs that physically hurt to listen to but also make the unbearable bearable

10: Don't dream it's over, Crowded House

Hey now, hey now
Don't dream it's over

This song came out in 1986, the day after my 9th birthday. It was also the year that my brother's childhood best friend, our neighbour George, died in car in accident. He was 16. A Māori boy with green eyes and blonde hair and a faint sense of Māui-like danger following him. His parents were the loveliest people I knew. I suppose that when that dumb-egg Paul Henry talks about getting back to the idyllic days of the 70s and 80s, he's referring to the way state-house kids like us all ran together in packs, a medley of migration stories whooping around one trampoline, which happened to be at our place and right underneath George's bedroom. Our families were close. I didn't understand that asking your neighbours for food was scabbing, so when Mum came home from work one day and found out I'd borrowed a cup of sugar from Mrs Taia, she was fuming. I'll still do it now, though. It's faster to pop next door in your bare feet than put on your shoes and drive to the shops. And I just don't feel the shame I'm meant to. How many stories do you think I can write about trips to the supermarket, versus stories about friendships that blossomed from the exchange of spices? Self-sufficiency is boring next to stories of borrowed trailers or trips to the airport in a blizzard to drop off your neighbour's Dad. The details of George's tangi are a blur now, but I remember sitting on the floor of their living room pretending to play, but really, spying on Mrs Taia. She was asleep in the armchair alone and she was crying. I knew it wasn't polite to stare, but I also couldn't drag my eyes away. Her body was doing two seemingly opposite things at once: crying, and dreaming. I was awestruck. Death had never visited us before. It was my first meeting with grief; from a safe distance. I suppose it's not surprising that when Darren died, I thought of Mrs Taia often. My body could do all kinds of opposite things while crying. All that long summer of 1986 and well into the next decade I could not listen to Don't Dream it's Over without feeling sick. Or sore, or worried or scared. Still now, when I hear it, my throat constricts. I see George's face, his beautiful green eyes, the danger he carried with him. And I see his mother, lovely Mrs Taia, weeping and dreaming alone in the middle of the lounge.

9: Basta de llamarme asi (enough, enough calling me that way) Los Fabulosos Cadillacs

I sing this song to you
In your voice, in your honour
and I swear that I will show my face every time that someone names you
here or there

On a theme, lead singer Gabriel Fernández Capello sings to his sister Tamara who died at the age of 17 of a cocaine overdose. I was the same age as Tamara when I first heard this song as an exchange student in Chile. Listening to this iconic Argentine reggae-fusion band might have been my first complete experience of existing inside another language without the need of translation. Sure, the lyrics are accessible enough. But the real bridge is the emotion. Vicentico begs his sister to stop calling him 'that way,' and promises he'll be going soon. It doesn't matter what language you use, here and there, aqui y alla, te ao marama, te ao wairua (the world of light, the world of spirit), these places are universally known.

8: Have you ever seen the rain? Creedence Clearwater Revival

When it's over so they say, it'll rain on a sunny day, shining down like water.

If there is a soundtrack to journaling, this is the one. It's not the song you listen to while journaling, it's the equivalent of the feeling that a journal gives you when you read it. There's a knack to this kind of journaling; the lens isn't focused on the emotional experience, it's focused on the detail; the things people say and do, the way they move, the way your best friend touches her Mum's silver hair and suggests she buy a new top at Farmers, this Mum of hers who you have known now more than half your life, who has dementia, whose eyes twinkle just like her own mother's at the same age, who you still remember lying in her coffin at the end of the hall so vivid, so quiet. Every journal entry is like this. Potentially. Like your daughter, standing there in her hoodie with her carry-on case as you screech up the arrival ramp, late and tooting, rolling her eyes at you because you're filming on your phone and cry-laughing, after the divorce, after you buried your brother, after you said yes, after you got sober, after, after, after.

7: One by U2

Have you come here for forgiveness?
Have you come to raise the dead?

I found my brother in a crowd of 60,000 people under the stars. So begins my own lyrics composed somewhere between here and there. It was 1993 and U2 was on tour at Mt Smart Stadium. If I said I remembered the song that was playing I’d be lying, but I know this much is true: I found my brother in a mosh pit when I wasn’t even looking for him. I was 16 and he was 21 and I hadn’t seen him in months. He was shirtless and slick with sweat, wasted and happy. He threw an arm around me as if he’d always planned it, this reunion of ours, and we danced together; man, how he loved to dance.

When I wrote about it forty-odd years later I was looking for him again:

It makes me wonder at the cosmic accident that determines who our siblings will be and where they will find us. One minute he was beside me, the next minute he was gone, swallowed up by the crowd. I searched and searched and searched but it was like he had never been. I wandered through the raised hands and the heaving shoulders and the pounding feet, looking for him. How can you lose someone that was right in front of you? 

I don't know what the lyrics to One ever meant to Bono. I can't be sure it's even U2's song anymore.

6: The Story by Brandi Carlile

these stories don't mean anything
when you've got no one to tell them to

When we left, we couldn’t get a breath. The harder we tried, the more difficult it became. We had to not focus on breathing, but when you try not to focus on breathing it’s all you can think about. And so for weeks and months we walked around gasping. We would sometimes ask each other: "did you get one?" referring to a complete breath in. Now, when she refers to that period, she will say “when we left…” or “when we were living in the camping ground…” as though it were her and me who left the marriage, not just me. Thelma and Louise, but make it mother and daughter. When she got a scholarship for University in another city on another island, I forced myself to ring Vicki because only a best friend will tell you what you don’t want to hear. A best friend comes not with logic, but history. The truest ones hold it gently. And in the nights when the suitcase she refused to pack until the very last minute sat waiting in the hall, I made myself go to sleep listening to Brandi Carlile’s “The Story,” so that I might begin to untangle the “I” from the “we”. But as for Bobbie, to this day, she says she just can’t.

5: My Father's House, Bruce Springsteen

My father's house shines hard and bright
It stands like a beacon calling me in the night

I couldn't have a top 10 songs-that-split-you-open without featuring the harp. And as I write this, I can hear the thudding of an axe hitting firewood outside, a man in crocs at work expending effort to ensure his family is warm as the burner chugs all through the night, all winter long, while he is away. I could have filled this spot with Neil Young or Nick Cave or Van Morrison or Leonard Cohen or Lynyrd Skynyrd or Dire Straits or Pink Floyd or Rory Gallagher or-or-or. So I notice how many painful songs are about men hurting their sons; men they might have loved rightly had patriarchy not stolen their capacity for affection and replaced it with merely labour. 'It's not always easy to tell pain from anger', Haimana says when he comes in and asks what I'm writing. He expresses this with such easy eloquence you could mistaken it for something small. It nearly makes me swerve and pick "Tougher than the Rest" but sometimes a song is a story, and that's what gave this one the edge. I can't listen to it without clasping my hands together and bowing to listen.

4: The Show, by Lenka

I want my money back
I want my money back
I want my money back

There’s a scene in the Swedish T.V. series Love and Anarchy where the daughter speaks to her father in a conversation that takes place between here and there. It’s so realistic you don’t realise what has happened at first. The daughter says “what have you done?”

And the father, very much alive, says:

"Please forgive me. It’s not as if you plan these things. Sometimes the waves are so big. My thoughts were going in every direction. I didn’t want to bother you. I knew I couldn’t survive it again. I just couldn’t go through that again. I’m sorry."

I believe in these words because I've heard them too. At Darren's service, Bobbie played a song he'd taught her on the ukulele just a few weeks earlier. I'd gone away and left him in charge and when I came home she’d mastered strumming. Before I left, she was… well, let’s just say I was hoping the ukulele phase would pass quickly. Darren wasn't a quitter though. He made her search up the chords to this weird little song he'd heard on the movie Moneyball, called 'The Show,' by Lenka. He slapped his leg to the beat, barking and nodding encouragement, and when she played it at his service with his children sitting around all singing to him I can remember thinking, bet you want your fucking money back now. I did eventually get around to watching Moneyball. It's not even about baseball. It's about a Dad giving up the major league and choosing his kid instead.

sorry. sorry.

3: I'm still Standing

Don't you know that I'm still standing
better than I ever did?
Looking like a true survivor
feeling like a little kid

My friend Kath threw a party for her friends when she died. She planned it all out, from the songs to the photo montage. She wanted everyone to know what a good time she'd had, and how grateful she was for every second she got. If you've been reading this blog for a few years you might remember my tribute to Kath (The best bits of life are the things we don't keep receipts for). She was carried out to the loudest, most partying rendition of "I'm still standing" that I've ever heard. Have you ever nearly pissed yourself crying? Every time I hear it, I think of the magnificence of Kath, buried too soon in Taupō with the infamous Monty Python quote on her headstone:

'Tis just a scratch! Alright, we'll call it a draw.

2: Hallelujah, Gin

I won't let you fade from no minds

There she was, strumming her guitar in the lounge of her parents home in Devonport. I first met Gin when she was maybe 10 or 11, a firecracker even then. She once babysat Cormac, famously getting him to push her around in the expensive pram, forever buggering up one of the wheels. Her father was my step-father's brother. Try again, but make it simpler: Gin's uncle was Mum's third husband. Okay, how about: Gin was my second step-father's niece. Okay whatever. Here's the memory: Gin was 17. She was sitting with her legs crossed on the couch singing the song that had just won a big international award and was about to be recorded. I couldn't relate to the connection she had with her father (possibly on account of the number of them I had to choose from), but I did know her Dad, to whom she is singing. Every time I hear it I am reminded of karanga, the ancient equivalent of the opening of the portal.

1: Cocaine & Abel, Amigo the Devil

Excuses will only do good if you're waiting around to die.

There was one time, just one time in the divorce, when I faced a man who was facing himself. It was so brief that if I didn't still have the short handwritten note I wouldn't believe the words were ever given. Had this level of vulnerability been sustained everything might have turned out different. But the thing about being an archivist, especially a just one, is that is you have to reckon with the evidence before you. Sometimes you read back journal entries and you see what you didn't see, and you hear what you couldn't then hear, and it's uncomfortable. It just might be that you weren't as good as you thought you were, or at least not as right all the time. And sure, we all have our reasons and very justified they may be, but sitting with discomfort is easier to demand of others than to ask of ourselves. When I listen to the lyrics of Cocaine & Abel it makes me feel as if trying isn't just necessary, but the whole point. It's a song that aches with self-reflection, but is also triumphant. I refuse to believe I have to be the same person I was born when I die.

Where'd this list come from?

Last week I was interviewed about my upcoming journaling workshop by Amy Delahunty on Access Radio. Before I went in, Amy asked me to suggest a song (just one!) to close out the interview and this set me off thinking about a lyrical match for the practice of journaling.

What is it about journaling, I wondered, that is mimicked by a song? It seems to me that at least one thing they have in common is that they have the capacity to make the unbearable bearable. Like the very best poems, songs are capable of communicating what sentences alone cannot.

Curating this list had me meditating all day about how much I love, really love, musicians. Their art. Their skill. Their vulnerability. Last year, Rachel Buchanan read what can only be described as a love letter to songwriters at the NZ Festival of the Arts. The prompt was a homage to 'My Art Mother' and I would never have seen it coming until half way through her reading when I thought, damn, (this usually happens with Rachel's writing), who else could we possibly credit for the source of all our creative inspiration? Songs are pure wairua. They tap into the realest parts of ourselves. The see and know things about us even we can't explain.

It's amazing how easily this brief was understood. When I said to Haimana "songs that give you a physical reaction like pain, but are also beautiful." His offerings were Fade to Black by Metallica, Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits, and Bright Eyes from Watership Down. He also suggested the Māori Battalion Trilogy by Prince Tui Teka (which made me realise that SO many waiata Māori fit this brief that it needs it own whole list.) Bobbie, who is always consulted on all matters music, asked for an hour and called back in under a quarter. Her three offerings were: Seriously, by Katchafire, Looking too closely, by Fink and - of course - the aforementioned The Show, by Lenka.

What are your recommendations? I'd love to hear them below. And if any other bloggers want to pick up and respond with your own top 10, I'd love to read them - if you link to this blog and then drop yours in the comments, we might get a chain-blog going?

The interview about journaling doesn't seem to be out on the website yet but here's the link for when it is added (and massive thanks to Amy for squeezing 23 odd minutes into a 15 min slot.) Please do share the link to get tickets with your Welly-based mates. The early release ticket period is almost finished and there will definitely still be tickets for general sale on Monday. But if you ARE someone who's eligible for a ticket now, and still feel nervous about registering for any reason (cost or some other barrier), please do send me an message. I also really appreciate everyone who's got in touch to say where you are based. Definitely keen to go on the road next year if there's enough interest!

Alright my mates, below the paywall are some pics to go with the musical selections - including one of me with Mr and Mrs Taia after I tracked them down a few years ago, plus a lil Thelma & Louise roadie video back when we were still wore matching outfits.

Honouring you and yours, those here and there, too.

Arohanui

Nadine

P.S. If you liked this post, you will LOVE this recommend: The Rainbow Connection (By Megan Falley & Andrea Gibson).

P.P.S. Gutted to read about the passing of Glen Hansard, who's "Falling Slowly" very nearly made this list or would have any other day. If you haven't seen the film "Once", you have to (surely right up there on the list of top 10 musicals?). This tribute by Bono is worth a read.