The Brooklyn Rail

Usually, I associate music with joy. It transports me out of the regular confines of life and into another realm, one imbued with a greater depth of feeling. As the drummer Art Blakey put it, “music washes away the dust of everyday life.” But it doesn’t just cleanse us, sharpening our senses; music adds color and volume to experience, amplifying it. Simply put, music can give us clear passage to the pure enjoyment of being alive.

That doesn’t mean the natural subject of music is happiness. In fact, many of the best songs take sadness as their subject. (Where would country music be without it?) By allowing us to pour our hearts into it, music becomes both a description of and a consolation for pain. When Hank Williams sings “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” the doleful lyrics and vulnerable hiccup in his voice hit a powerfully recognizable place.

But a lot of feelings don’t fall clearly on the diurnal axis of sunny joy or moonlit melancholy. They’re often as hard to articulate as to endure. These are the times of estrangement: from our surroundings, from others, from ourselves. When I’m in the grip of those feelings, music often loses its visceral power; that yawning sense of depression or dislocation seems to push music away from me. It’s like I can’t quite hear it properly, and turning up the volume doesn’t help either.

Psychologist Pauline Boss developed a concept called “ambiguous loss” to help articulate the idea of ongoing emotional hardship. It started with roots in a specific set of circumstances, families who had lost a member but had no final reckoning with that person’s death, as when mourning a soldier who is permanently identified as missing in action. But it came to have much broader resonance, the difficulty of coping with things that have no definable beginning or ending. This can plausibly be said of most experience, because even when something seems to have very specific parameters (the beginning and ending dates of a relationship, or a life), our feelings about it may remain inchoate and unresolved.

Even on the rare occasion that an experience feels entirely positive, it lives inside of us alongside negative feelings. That simultaneity is one of the hardest things to manage, as these emotions all swirl around in the mutable, sometimes inscrutable being called the self. Where does it all lead? Perhaps to a greater knowledge of that self; inexorably toward its dissolution. As the poet Delmore Schwartz wrote, “Time is the school in which we learn / Time is the fire in which we burn.”

Drummer and composer Chase Elodia explores some of these difficult-to-reconcile ideas in his recently released recording, Have, Know, Want (Biophilia Records). Realized in conjunction with his ensemble, Perennials, the set of eight songs examines the concept of ambiguous loss through shifting perspectives, both lyrically and musically. The title track uses simple language to investigate a complex subject; the nature of desire. “I want to want / What I want / I want to know / what I want,” sings vocalist Claire Dickson in a chalky, breathy voice, the music surging and drawing on both a jazz and an indie sensibility. Turning a certainty—I want what I want—into an uncertainty suggests the yearning and disappointment that come with being human, and call to mind a fascinating Buddhist concept, that nirvana, the highest state of being, involves not the fulfillment of desire, but its extinguishment. To desire is constantly to chase something, and often not to recognize its unattainability; it is a state of being, and a frustrating one.

The ensemble played this and other songs from the recording at its release party in May at Public Records. Elodia expressed his thanks for the beautiful concert space and appreciative crowd, before admitting, “we recently came back from doing a show in Boston that was just… bad. The room had fluorescent lights, and three-fifths of the audience was made up of family members.” This honesty of approach informed his diverse collection of songs from the album, each told via a different presence. In “Cartwheels on a Tightrope,” the narrator is reckless and carefree: “We kicked away / Every thought, every word, / Each concern— / We were too intoxicated by our bodies.” But in “Drift,” the narrator is someone in the grip of dementia, observing, “They’ve taken my keys / Moved me out of my home / They’ve asked me to give up / Everything I own.” In the final selection on the recording, “Tense,” the narrator struggles with past and present as they bleed into each other: “I had to learn to speak In a tense / That was shifting / I used to call you, you / I used to call you, you, you / The words that I once used / The words that I once knew / Are changing: He who is, was / He who does, did / What he have we hold / Until it's gone.”

Elodia is a sensitive lyricist, whose music displays a similar energy and refinement. He is drawn to poetic expression, as in a previous project, Walking in the City, in which he invited eight Brooklyn poets from diverse backgrounds to describe a walk in their neighborhoods. The show he played to debut his new recording featured two other artists, Becca Stevens and Catherine Brookman, who also find new ways to explore the traditional song format, reveling in the unexpected and pushing in new directions. Together, their works admit a welcome complexity, though not in a forbidding way. Rather, they seem to acknowledge that many of our emotions are comprised of multi-hued shadings.

In a world that favors triumphalist narratives, it’s refreshing to see music that acknowledges everyday difficult feelings like grief and confusion. One organization that seeks to change the narrative on this subject is Sound Mind, which uses music as a vehicle for exploring and enlarging our understanding of mental health. Through helplines, community resources, holistic healing, and festivals, they allow people to come forward and address the sometimes-painful issues they face. One of the main themes is “It’s okay not to be okay,” a powerful affirmation for anyone in distress.

We tend to view our physical state in strict binary terms—you’re either healthy or sick—when, in fact, we are all on a continuum of health. The same is true of our mental state. Yet the changes we endure always seem to come as a big surprise. It’s like the line in the standard made famous by Frank Sinatra, “That’s Life”: “You’re riding high in April / Shot down in May.” Except the fall can take place in the course of a single day, or an hour. Music offers one way of helping us cope with this condition of unexpected and often bewildering change. By mining the ambiguities of our experiences, we help to make some sense of our lives. We may never fully gain the sense of control and regularity that we seek to soothe ourselves, but we can practice patience and understanding. And if we’re lucky, we can get back to the place where music permeates our very being, and transports us once again.