Climate Emotions playlist

 Music is one of the most important means for encountering climate emotions for myself, together with spending time outdoors, socializing with others, and doing embodied practices.

 

This playlist is an emotional journey. The atmospheres (a suitable word for the the topic, huh?) are more important than the lyrics, but some tracks have also been selected because of their lyrics. The playlist does follow roughly a process of crisis. There are fluctuations of sorrow and anger, but also of hope and beauty – as in our lives amidst the ecological crisis.

 

I would recommend listening to the playlist first without reading my comments about the songs, but many methods are suitable here.

 

1. Moby: Why does my heart feel so bad (reprise version)

Reprise: the heart feels so bad again.

The playlist starts with the situation where many people have found themselves in: asking why does it feel so bad. Especially when I started my work around eco-anxiety in the early 2010s, people had great difficulty recognizing the reasons for their eco-emotions, because they were not much publicly discussed.

The female voices sing a crucial recommendation and plea: “Please open doors.” Please try to feel, even though it is difficult, even though it is often painful. If you can keep your emotions open, life will be so much more meaningful. But we need to support each other around difficult emotions such as grief and anger.

 

Please check out also the music video for this Reprise version: it has strong elements of ecological grief and motivation to help, especially as related to more-than-human animals.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tcKf4Kh9oE

 

2. Black Sabbath: Age of Reason

Instead of an Age of Emotions, we get an Age of Reason. In the midst of it, premonitions, bad omens.

“Do you hear the thunder

Raging in the sky?

Premonition of a shattered world that's gonna die…”

Anger starts to build. “Sustainable extinction” is a topic which needs to be discussed with electic guitars.

“Always felt that there'd be trouble

Mass distraction hides the truth

Prozac days and sleepless hours

Seeds of change that don't bear fruit”

(psychic numbing, despair, knowing that this can’t last)

 

“These time are heavy and you're all alone

The battle's over but the war goes on”

(many people have felt isolation and loneliness because of climate anxiety, grief, and anger)

 

3. Weather Station: The Robber

An ingenious song about the implication of people into ways of life which damage the planet, people, and non-humans. One would think that robbers would be easily recognisable. But they are tempting and clever. They got social acceptance:

“Permission by words, permission of thanks

Permission by laws, permission of banks

White table cloth dinners”

And they entangle common people into the crowd.

 

Until finally, all there is is the grief and anxiety, the stupor about the greed and destruction, the kicked-up dust amidst the ruins.

 

4. Smashing Pumpkins: Bullet with Butterfly Wings

The rage finds its target. But the frustration and powerlessness is deep.

“And what do I get, for my pain?

Betrayed desires, and a piece of the game”

 

“Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.

Then someone will say what is lost can never be saved”

 

5. Godspeed You! Black Emperor: First of the Last Glaciers

The anger transforms into sorrow.

Mourning the disappearing glaciers and other forms of climate grief through the sublime sounds of the Canadian post-rock band.

 

6. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: Sun Forest

The depth of the grief. Cave mourns the death of his teenage son. But many things can be wept at once.

“I lay in the forest amongst the butterflies and the fireflies

And the burning horses and the flaming trees

As a spiral of children climb up to the sun

Waving goodbye to you and goodbye to me

As the past pulls away and the future begins

I say goodbye to all that as the future rolls in

Like a wave, like a wave

And the past with its savage undertow lets go”

 

7. SUAD: The Burn

The grief process continues towards more light.

Sorrow has become an old friend. But other old friends include Meaning.

 

“and when the light it shines on you

there’s a point of no return

‘though you’re hiding in the darkness

I still did feel the burn

and in the deepest of the deep

you see, there always is a yearn”

 

8. Tori Amos: Enjoy the Silence

(Depeche Mode cover)

 

Grief does not end at once, but the process can advance. There are fluctuations, but also recovery and adjustment. One may experience growing existential intensity, the trembling pathos of being alive: “all I ever wanted, all I ever needed, is here in my arms”.

 

“Feelings are intense

Words are trivial

Pleasures remain

So does the pain

Words are meaningless

And forgettable

All I ever wanted

All I ever needed

Is here in my arms”

 

9. Sigur Rós: Njósnavélin (Untitled #4)

No lyrics which can be understood here. Just sublime music of being alive. Tis is a personally very important song for me. It speaks to me about “suloisenhaikeus”, the combination of sweetness and sadness: gratitude because life has been and is, and sadness because everything on Earth is fleeting.

 

The album where the song was published, titled “( )”, includes many moods. The opening song, Vaka, has an intense music video which touches on heavy eco-anxiety (content warning, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqJ8hFgYwVg). After a low-mood second track, the third one focuses on peaceful comfort, and then comes Njósnavélin, which has in itself many moods. The rest of the album includes both heavy sadness (e.g. Daudalagid) and exploding life energy (Popplagid).

 

10. snny: A Better World / The Times They Are A-Changing

I could have ended the playlist with Njósnavélin, which would have reflected one arch of emotions. But now the playlist moves towards more empowerment and more adjustment. Dylan’s classic song has been joined with modern sequences and cryptic lyrics, but the general mood of the song is what speaks to me. The world is changing in many ways; the waters are rising, but there is also a lot of personal and social commitment going on towards an effort to make many things better.

 

Who or what is the singer singing about? “Teach me how to find you…”

 

11. Glissandro 70: Bolan Muppets

If one is able to experience sadness, one is also able to experience joy. And if has ended up repressing sadness, including ecological grief, one will have trouble with deep joy, too.

 

This is a song of deep joy. Which can sparkle even amidst the sadness of the world.

 

12. Katy Perry: Roar

We also need a sense of humor. This song and its video have a lot of it, but they also have references to “The Eye of the Tiger”: the determination and grit needed to rise up. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Don’t be scared to rock the boat and make a mess, if there’s injustice around. Let your roar out (cf. climate rage).

 

13. Pyhimys feat. Vesta: Kynnet, kynnet

The playlist get close to the Finnish. Pyhimys is one the most eminent rap artists in Finland and Vesta is a noted young singer-songwriter. The lyrics of the song are almost commentaries of Renée Lertzman’s Environmental Melancholia (2015) and Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in their Own Land (2016). “Kynnet” means nails; the song is about people who feel so strongly that they are losing their grip on life – that their fingers are slipping – that they resort to maladaptive defences such as climate denial and following authoritarian leaders. But the song is not just a lament: it encourages people to understand each other and to try to find ways to encounter reality together.

 

“En sopeudu, auta

Jotain puuttuu, ote lipsuu, ei ilman kynsiä saa tartuttuu

Herkkii, epävarmoi, yksinäisii

Yhdistää vaan tunne että ei oo meitä”

(“I can’t adjust, please help me

Something’s missing, my grip is loosening, I can’t keep a hold without nails

Sensitive, uncertain, lonely

The only thing in common is that there’s no we”)

 

14. Litku Klemetti: Juna Kainuuseen

“Suhtaudun ilmastonmuutokseen / paremmin kun sun rakkauden puutokseen”. The I of the lyrics finds it easier to adapt to climate change than to the lovelessness of a person close to her. Mood-wise, the song speaks to a springtime wanderlust, for example by taking a train towards the countryside. “Nyt helvetin iso pato murtuu” (“now a f#¤%ing big dam is breaking”)

 

15. Mark Kozelek & Jimmy LaValle: Somehow the Wonder of Life Prevails

An encore: more a summary of the whole playlist than a final song. A long piece about difficulties in life and still the experience that somehow, somehow…

“And in the midst of all the agonies and hardness I felt, somehow the wonder of life always prevails”