Why you got angry at a piece of music

Years ago, after a session, someone told me that the drum track I’d played had made them irrationally angry.

Not annoyed. Furious. A rising, hot, where-did-that-come-from fury, from a piece of music with no words, in a room where nothing had happened.

I told them it had done its job.

We know music does this. We’ve all known it since we were teenagers. There’s music to make us cry, music to get us hyped, music to put us into a trance — they literally call it trance music. Nobody finds it strange that a song can pull a feeling out of a person in three bars. And yet when it happens in a quiet room with your eyes closed, we’re embarrassed by it, as if the feeling were a malfunction.

It isn’t. It’s the whole point.

Here’s what I think was happening for the person with the drums. Somewhere in them was an anger that had never been allowed out — an old one, with no story attached any more, just a charge, stored. Anger that doesn’t get felt doesn’t leave. It waits. And a body carrying a charge like that is always, quietly, a little braced against it.

Then a drum track came along that matched it. The rhythm, the intensity, something. And for a few minutes the body felt safe enough — eyes closed, guided, nothing to do — to let the charge rise. The music didn’t create the anger. It found it.

That’s why I change the tracks from week to week. Different music reaches different places. A track that’s soothing to one person is sad to another and infuriating to a third, and every one of those responses is telling the person something true about what they’re carrying. I’ve had people cry at a track they’d describe as “nice.” I’ve had people feel nothing at all, and that’s fine too.

If a piece of music makes you angry, or tearful, or restless, or strangely bereft, don’t apologise for it and don’t turn it off — unless it’s genuinely too much, in which case turn it down, open your eyes, and come back another time. Otherwise: feel it. Let it rise, let it be there, let it pass. Ask it, if you like: what are you? Sometimes an answer comes. Often it doesn’t, and the feeling just moves through and you’re lighter afterwards, and that’s the answer.

It’s worth saying what to do if a track really doesn’t work for you — not too much, just wrong. Turn it down. Put on something of your own. The music is a tool, not a test, and the wrong tool for you might be exactly the right one for the person next to you. Nobody gets marks for enduring a track they hate.

And if nothing came up at all — if the track was just a track — that’s fine too. Some weeks the body has nothing waiting. Some weeks it has a lot and the music isn’t the key. There’s no scoreboard. The only mistake is deciding, from one session, what you are.

We spend a lot of energy making sure nothing gets in. Music gets in anyway. That’s its gift, and it’s why I’ll keep playing the drums.

If you’ve ever been embarrassed by what a song did to you, you weren’t malfunctioning. You were feeling something your body had been waiting to feel. It’s not your fault nobody told you that was allowed.

Every Tuesday I run a live guided session online, with music that changes every week and a room where nobody apologises for what comes up. Come and try one, and see how you feel afterwards.

— Adam