Where Joy and Grief Share the Same Song
The same artist soundtracked both my mother’s death and my son’s birth—cruel coincidence that branded his voice with the entire spectrum of human experience. Now I can’t hear those songs without feeling simultaneous gratitude and grief, joy and loss occupying the same emotional space. The music didn’t choose these moments; the moments chose the music, imprinting it permanently with associations the artist never intended.
Some musicians accidentally become the narrators of our most extreme moments. They’re just making songs, releasing albums, touring venues. They have no knowledge that their three-minute composition is playing during someone’s last breath, or first kiss, or catastrophic betrayal, or moment of transcendent joy. Yet their melodies become permanently encoded with our most intense experiences, carrying emotional weight far beyond anything the songwriter imagined.
The song playing during my worst breakup shares my playlist with the song from my wedding reception. My phone shuffles between the soundtrack of heartbreak and the soundtrack of love beginning, forcing me to experience the full range of romantic possibility in random sequence. One moment I’m back in that apartment, relationship ending, feeling like I’d never recover. Next moment I’m dancing with Happy, believing in forever. Same device, same earbuds, completely opposite memories triggered by different tracks from the same decade.
Music preserves our emotional extremes without judgment, playing tragedy and comedy with equal enthusiasm. It doesn’t care that this song reminds you of your father’s funeral while that song recalls your graduation celebration. It just plays, indifferent to the emotional whiplash it creates. The algorithm suggests “songs you might like” based on musical similarity, completely ignorant of the fact that these similar-sounding tracks carry devastatingly different associations.
This creates a strange relationship with certain artists. I love their music but can’t always listen to it because the memories are too intense, too contradictory, too much to process while commuting or cooking dinner. The songs are beautiful, but they’re also landmines—you never know which memory will detonate, which emotional extreme will surface.
The most powerful songs are the ones that soundtrack moments we couldn’t choose. Not the songs we deliberately selected for weddings or playlists, but the ones that just happened to be playing when life happened. The radio song during the car accident. The cafe’s background music during the conversation that changed everything. The neighbor’s stereo bleeding through walls during your darkest night. These accidental soundtracks often become more meaningful than intentional ones because they’re authentically tied to the raw experience rather than our curated version of it.
There’s something about music’s ability to preserve not just the memory but the feeling—the precise emotional texture of that moment frozen in melody and rhythm. You can describe a breakup in words and it’s just description. But hear the song that was playing and you’re instantly transported back into that exact feeling, that specific quality of pain, that particular shade of sadness or rage or numb acceptance.
And because music is designed to be repeated—played over and over, unlike singular life events—these preserved emotions become infinitely accessible. You can relive your highest highs and lowest lows whenever you want, or whenever shuffle decides for you. This is both gift and curse: the ability to access joy from years ago, but also the inability to escape grief that music keeps alive.
Some songs I’ve had to retire completely. Too heavy, too loaded, too much history compressed into three minutes. Others I return to deliberately, using them as time machines to visit younger versions of myself, to remember what certain moments felt like before time smoothed their rough edges into story.
The artist who soundtracked both death and birth for me—I still listen, but differently now. His voice contains multitudes in ways he’ll never know. He made music thinking about melody, lyrics, production, commercial success, artistic expression. He had no idea his songs would become vessels carrying someone’s entire emotional spectrum, preserving the best and worst moments of a stranger’s life.
What music carries your highest highs and lowest lows?
For me: Jeff Buckley’s “Hallelujah” played during my mother’s final hours—we chose it deliberately, knowing she loved it, creating one last beautiful moment. But “Grace” was playing randomly when my son was born, hospital radio offering the same artist at the opposite end of life’s spectrum. Now I can’t hear Buckley without experiencing birth and death simultaneously, beginning and ending in the same voice.
Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” soundtracked my worst depression in my twenties—played on repeat during months of darkness, becoming anthem of that particular despair. But “No Surprises” was playing the night I met Happy, cafe background music during our first real conversation. Same band, same era, completely opposite associations. Thom Yorke narrates both my pit and my resurrection without knowing either exists.
Beethoven’s Ninth soundtracked my first experience of transcendent beauty in music—seventeen years old, concert hall, understanding for the first time that sound could be sublime. But it also played during my grandfather’s memorial service years later, chosen by someone who knew he loved it. The “Ode to Joy” now contains both pure aesthetic transcendence and profound personal loss. The same notes carry completely opposite emotional charges.
These aren’t the songs I chose to represent these moments—they’re songs that happened to be present, that witnessed what happened, that got imprinted with experiences they were never meant to carry. They’re accidental archivists, preserving the full spectrum of human experience in melody and rhythm, making us relive both heaven and hell at the push of a button, shuffle treating tragedy and triumph as equivalently valid playlist entries.
And maybe that’s fitting. Maybe music’s greatest power is exactly this: the ability to hold contradictions, to preserve opposites, to contain the full range of human emotional experience without demanding resolution. Life doesn’t separate into neat categories of happy songs and sad songs. It’s all mixed together—joy touched by grief, grief touched by joy, love and loss intertwined so completely you can’t extract one without destroying both.
Music understands this better than we do. It plays everything, feels everything, preserves everything without judgment or hierarchy. Your wedding song and your funeral song can coexist on the same album, in the same key, from the same artist, because music knows what we’re slowly learning: that the highest highs and lowest lows aren’t opposites but partners, different notes in the same complex chord that makes up a human life.
The artist who narrated my extremes will never know he did. He’ll never know his voice carries both my greatest grief and my greatest joy. But that’s okay—he doesn’t need to know. The songs do what songs do: they play, they preserve, they make us feel everything we’ve ever felt, all at once if we let them, reminding us that being human means containing multitudes, experiencing the full spectrum, living with the volume turned all the way up even when it hurts, especially when it hurts, because feeling everything is better than feeling nothing at all.
