Three different musicians have distracted me in recent weeks. I was in dire need of distraction – you know the way it goes sometimes. I used to get it with wine, drinking enough to take the edges off, enough to transport me to a softer, smoother place. I used to get it by stuffing my face with comforting, greasy food, the kind I ate as a child the day my father was buried. I used to escape by bingeing on reality television. The truth is I still do that. It’s not realistic to shake every single one of your vices. You’d be viceless, which is only one letter away from voiceless, and we can’t be having that.
I’d been thinking maybe too much about death and dying. I’d been wondering whether that was healthy or unhealthy or a little bit of both. I asked a therapist. She was kind and clear and said we could explore it all safely in the coming weeks. But in the meantime I needed some distraction. In recent times three musicians and three albums have done the job of distraction and escape better than a lake of wine or a truckload of batter burgers or the endless parade of wealthy women on television with tight faces and tiny dogs.
First came Taylor Swift with her new album The Life of a Showgirl. Sashaying into my ears to remind me that her momma was correct: you have to keep dancing through the lightning strikes and sometimes there is nothing for it but to make our own sunshine. Life is a song, it ends when it ends, Swift sings on Opalite, my favourite track. Of course people on the internet got busy immediately. Crafting a million hot takes as cold as ice about the album. Take your pick: Swift is no good when she’s madly in love; or Swift is greedy, selling too many vinyl versions of the album; or Swift is cringe to the max and shouldn’t be making funny jokes about her fiancé’s intimate body parts; or Swift is actually punching down on the diss track Actually Romantic.
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I just lay down on my bed, not thinking of death or dying, only listening to the album over and over. I told the world to leave me the feck alone, and it did. (Wow.) The songs took me away to Portofino in Italy and to the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris. They took me to Lenox in Massachusetts where the fictional showgirl grew up and where her father “whored around as all men did”.
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Speaking of men whoring around, Lily Allen’s album offered another great distraction. There has never been an album like West End Girl. Allen has laid herself bare, painted her pain in compelling technicolour. It’s autofiction. It’s loosely based on real events. It’s faction. It’s the grimmest fairytale. It’s a story of betrayal and gaslighting, a tale as old as time.
If Swift cleverly serves up the breadcrumbs of her life for us to decode, Allen gives us the whole loaf. West End Girl has women I know remembering the times they’ve bent themselves out of shape for a man or changed themselves so drastically they didn’t recognise their faces in the mirror. It has women remembering the day they woke up and said no more. Enough. They left a note, some of them. Or they just disappeared. Allen cried for two hours in a studio and then, in 10 days, made an album that gave the whole world chapter and verse on her suffering. Healing comes in many forms.
Sometimes we have to pick the scabs. There is a scab under my right nostril I can’t stop picking. Stop picking, I tell myself. But I can’t. I don’t drink alcohol but I drink too many cans of fizzy pop, in a dizzying variety of flavours. My attic is full of things I don’t need but can’t seem to get rid of. There are riots and hypocrites and haters. There are wars and walls being torn down and existential fears creeping in.
I put on the headphones again, head in the sand. Niall Breslin’s album The Place that Has Never Been Wounded is maybe the most surprising of the three. Some people preferred him in The Blizzards, singing Trust Me I’m a Doctor. But he hasn’t been that artist for a long time. Now he has made an instrumental piano album, which he is offering as another way to heal and to escape. It’s brave in a different way to Allen.
Like her, Bressie knows we can’t avoid the things that make us uncomfortable. We have to sit with them. His album helps us to do that. To live it all even when it feels excruciating. Especially then.
Artists sing their songs, their pain, their insights, their hopes, their healing and we listen. To the words of a 40-year-old divorced mother of two emerging from a psychic storm. To the songs of a loved-up, immortal showgirl. To an earnest, altruistic man playing his heart and soul out on the piano, hoping to deliver stillness and calm in a world of chaos. It’s all a beautiful distraction from death and from life which, just like a song, will end when it ends.
