The Best Songs Are Not Always The Best Lovers

I figured out how to have an affair without cheating in 2013, soon after my second child was born. I was twenty-six, exhausted, creatively frustrated, lonely, and horny as hell. My first affair with a pop song was also the awakening of what would later become problematic mania, but at the time, I did not recognize it as such. Even now, I am using the word affair as shorthand for something that I still don’t fully understand.

What it looked like on the outside: Me lying on the floor, listening to Julian Casablancas’ sexy autotune on Daft Punk’s newest album, Random Access Memories. What it felt like: The 80s-reminiscent melody zipping through my brain and body, turning me into a slurry of pleasure. Something was happening that wasn’t the chills or goosebumps, or even frisson, that I was used to feeling when I listened to music. It was sexual, like reverse synesthesia: the sound taking root in my body, as all-encompassing as an erotic possession.

  At first I thought what the reader might think: I probably just had a crush on Julian Casablancas—who wouldn’t? So, after the kids were asleep, I went on YouTube and watched as many Strokes videos and interviews as I could find. And I found that Julian was cute and grungy, but that he did nothing for me on his own, stripped of that liquid, drug-like pop song shimmer.  

My fantasies were changing, it seemed. I knew that I was generally sad and unfulfilled, but finding solace in thoughts of another man was too clunky. Fantasy Man’s desires would be rudimentary, predictable, and demanding. I was caring full-time for two children under the age of two. I was a writer who wasn’t writing. A musician who wasn’t making music. A wife who felt emotionally invalidated—my husband, a lawyer, was obsessed with facts, and I couldn’t seem to keep mine straight enough to win an argument. I had no time or patience for an extra character—real or not—to come charging in. So, I opened myself to the music.

I was still ruthlessly (and naively) devoted to my husband, but I felt like I was taking up too much space in his life. With my wild creative bursts, my mood swings that had me lazily (and inaccurately) diagnosed as bipolar, and my history of psychiatric hospitalizations, it seemed that the right direction to take was to become less of myself. Shed some of the “extra.” Be more of a motherly pillar, make lists and chore charts. Go for stroller walk circuits with both dogs in tow. I tried so hard, but the “extra” came crashing back at me until I was black-out seething to “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails—which seems obvious for its lyrics, but the lyrics were secondary to that elusive skip in the beat that I still can’t quite locate, like the necessarily erratic rhythm of a tongue. Listen for it. 

For years it went on like this. Other forms of mania and hypo-mania came snaking in, braiding their way into and around the music. I’ve since learned that this is how stress and boredom manifest in my life—bursts of dreamy energy, imaginary conspiracies, and harmless delusions that sweep in to rescue me from stagnation and emotional trauma. (For months I believed that I was the reincarnation of the playwright Moss Hart.) 

These things came and went, terrifically, like exotic birds, but the songs persisted. They appeared on their own terms, never predictably. You would think that I could just plug into my favorite artists whenever I wanted, bleed them of their sexual energy. But the best songs are not always the best lovers. Like real affairs, I always bumped into the song that wanted to take hold of me—on the radio or offered innocently by an algorithm—like bumping into a stranger on an elevator.

Here is a list of the “affair partners” that I can remember, each lasting for up to three weeks, like a fever, until another took over:

The Strokes, “Ask Me Anything” 

The Guy You Think You Can Save. Something about the low register of the vocals felt like it was sung for my ears alone, like I was the only person in the world who could understand the depth of the singer’s ennui.

Nothing But Thieves, “Trip Switch” 

The Lowkey Kinky One. The urgent vocals felt like that nice guy who only gets off when you tell him he’s worthless. It was…endearing? There was a trickly aftershock guitar effect that was titillating. It made my nipples hard.

 Sylvan Esso, “Jaime’s Song” 

The Artistic Girl Crush. The vocals were gloved in delicious electric pop, with a beat that was assured and trustworthy, but also challenging. A kind, but slightly pushy lover. The girlfriend who tells you that you have “so much potential.”

Cold War Kids, “First” 

Toxic Arguments Turned Great Makeup Sex. The simple but persistent basketball drumbeat of the song, mixed with its somewhat frantic vocals revved every sexual “bad idea” in my body. 

The Killers, “Runaways” 

So masculine and cliché! We all need a leather jacket fling.

I know what it is to be obsessed with a song, to listen to it on repeat until your eardrums feel gummy. This was not that. These songs had personalities. They touched me, took hold. Some of them I did not even like.

Even as I write this, I am thinking, What’s wrong with me? Maybe I had fallen into a very niche category of postpartum psychosis turned sexual synesthesia? I’ve googled these things and some of the diagnoses are familiar, but never quite right. It reminds me of how my doctors, therapists, and psychiatrists would often reach deep into the magician’s hat of their suspicions when it came to labeling my seemingly mysterious strain of mental illness. One doctor suspected that my panic attacks were actually seizures in disguise and wanted me to stay in a hospital hooked up to sensors for three nights. 

“But who will watch my children?” I asked him, aghast. I went home without answers. 

My own experiences tend to veer away from textbook diagnoses, almost like I am making them up, or trying to write them cleverly into a novel. And, as it turns out, it was not in any article, or on WebMD, or at the doctor’s office, where I finally began to recognize myself. It was in fiction.

In Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, an artist, stifled by the sudden lack of inner life brought on by motherhood, discovers that she is turning into a dog. She does, in fact, turn into a dog, and she accomplishes all the dog things that I would do, if I too had such luck. In The Upstairs House, by Julia Fine, a new mother becomes consumed by a complex and lengthy delusion involving two characters from her unfinished dissertation. At the end, she is treated for postpartum psychosis, but her delusions are anything but arbitrary.

To me stories like these are not fiction. They are reminders that not everything is perfectly diagnosable, that my experiences can exist as truth, even if they only make sense as a metaphor, which would be something like: The submerged monster of our passions will eventually rear its head. 

Or this: What strange heroes will our minds create for us, to pull us out of mundanity? 

I can see now that what I was searching for in a diagnosis was not a means to a cure. I did not want to learn how to function; I wanted to learn how to thrive. The mothers in Nightbitch and The Upstairs House may have been overcome by their individual manias, making ordinary life unsustainable, but their afflictions point more towards an imbalance in ordinary life, rather than a problem in their natures. Ordinary life will always have the upper hand. It will always be the axis toward which we are steered when things get weird. The psychiatrist who diagnosed my panic attacks as seizures might have found it to be the safer, less destructive option; to question my neurological functioning rather than take an honest look at how messed up everything else was around me. 

I, in turn, might have taken a step back when the songs started taking over, asking myself what was lacking in my life—intimacy, for example, or self-expression, or something as simple and basic as fun—before blaming my mind.  

I don’t meet songs in elevators anymore, because I don’t need to. I’m divorced. I am writing books and making music and speaking my mind. I have a boyfriend who is also my bandmate, which blends my obsession with music and need for intimacy quite nicely. I hope to stay on this path, having seen the extent to which my mind will go when I try to whittle it down, starving myself of the things that I need. No art, no sex, no wonder. It’s never going to work. The backlash will just become less scientific, less treatable. And more beautifully and essentially bizarre.