BREAK/BROKEN: BREAKDOWN

Hmmm, possibly straying to close to the bone with this one, given I am currently "unwell" and away from work. Let's just say the NHS is a tough frontline to be patrolling at present, as we balance the (I wish!) post-plague demand with the ongoing per-plague issues, with much less than pre-plague resources or manpower. I'm OK, no walls hit, being able to recognise the signs and to get the help, but it set me thinking about how popular music tackles this phenomenon. Sure, I need to call it stress and burn-out, but it is, is it not, as much a cipher as was/is nervous breakdown. (And I'm sorta guessing, that the myriad breakdowns in bluegrass are probably a whole different kettle, if a shame, as there are so many good ones.....)

19th Nervous Breakdown/Rolling Stones

Clearly the template was the Stones. Far from number 19 myself, it is a cracking little number, prescient and surprisingly forthright for its day, when Jagger was singing about more than just chicks and whips. Indeed, it was, almost, a subject they stuck with for a while, but I'm eschewing the mother's little helpers for now. But that's enough about me. Where else can we find psych advice?

Breakdown/Grace Jones

I am uncertain if, in the the original Tom Petty version, this was a song that fits this concept/conceit, with the lyric sounding an almost passive aggressive exhortation to a possibly soon to be ex, but I so much like the idea of Grace Jones imparting wellbeing advice. I think she might, too. So, that being sufficient, Dr Jones is yer girl. Mind you, she has form in this arena. And her remedy, is it not, actually half the battle. 

Breakdown/Dawn McCarthy & Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

Kris Kristofferson strikes me as a fella who knows a demon when he sees one, and he certainly captures the sense of oft accompanying melancholia that can sit alongside anxiousness, shame and guilt. He wrote the above song, arguably better known in the version by the Everly Brothers, but I like this one, the poignant pairing of vocals as evocative as the siblings, maybe, courtesy Oldham/Billy, that little bit more. 

Breakdown/Jack Johnson

I think this is probably allegorical, a characteristically bouncy song from the onetime surf dude. I think he is better than he usually gets credit for, and if he can't say stop, I want to get off, well, who can? It is an insightful lyric, actually, and one that heightens my opinion of him all the more. For perspective, however, i offer the below, a truly ludicrous song that has my tongue as far in my cheek as it goes. If I were ever to worry, ol' Eddie has me convinced I ain't. Which makes this indulgence totally therapeutic, don't it?

Nervous Breakdown/Eddie Cochran

So much better am I now feeling, care of the healing power of rock and roll, here is something that also popped up, something I have on an odd compilation, Beginners Guide to Asian Lounge, which is actually pretty good. The mix of instrumentation and internal rhythms are quite a good representation of the maelstrom of conflicting emotions that congress when the candle has burnt too hard. Unless I am just hearing that as I need, but, either which way, all things being equal, normal service to be returned sooner or later

Emotional Breakdown/Mo Magic

(You liked the Earl Scruggs at the beginning too, did you?)

Boats: A Pirate Looks At Forty

Jimmy Buffett: A Pirate Looks At Forty (original) [purchase]

Jack Johnson: A Pirate Looks At Forty (cover) [purchase]

I wrote this for an old friend of mine a few years back who could just not seem to find his occupation in the twentieth century, so he just chose to live in a fantasy world. And then I looked at him [and] I went, well what the hell's wrong with that?

I'll be the first to admit I'm not really a Jimmy Buffett fan, though you gotta admire a guy who has figured out how to make a way of life out of wearing hawaiian shirts and drinking frozen blender drinks on some warm tropical beach. But there's something absolutely universal about this modern pirate's midlife crisis that always gets to me. Maybe it's because I'm getting old myself. Like Buffett's narrator, I'm a far cry from the man of potential I once was; like him, I often feel that my talents would have been better applied, and my urges better served, in a world which had already passed by the time I was born.

That the song delivers its autobiography with no stronger tone than a faint whiff of bittersweet is pure easygoing Buffett; its shrug of beach-resort regret models for us an acceptance of the world-as-it-is which is, if still not exactly what we hoped for, at least free of stress, and still sweet under its little paper umbrella. Meanwhile, surfer Jack Johnson's cover of the song 30 years later is hushed, and more introspective, with a perfect bowed cello undertone like the sea itself; Johnson is younger, but you can hear it: he knows, too, the way the subjective world of what-could-be shrinks as we grow old.