Music And Depression Quotes & Sayings

Then, when the Depression came, all of this changed completely. Since that time, the entire public is of a very different sort and there was not so much support for contemporary music in a direct way. — Elliott Carter

When you're feeling down ...
Smile
Stand tall, shoulder back
Compliment someone
Help someone in a big or small way
Listen to music
Clean your space
Plan your day
Do what your brain tells you can't or shouldn't
Pray (or meditate) with a focus on gratitude
Breathe — Charles F. Glassman

I'm not interested in Bob Marley telling me to 'lively up' myself. The only music that satisfies me is Nine Inch Nails and Trent Reznor's voice crying through industrial rhytms. In the August evenings, I lie on my bed with earphones, letting his laments roll through me like unrepentant thunderstorms. I envy the courage that carries his voice into the world. He doesn't berate himself for pain and anger; he howls. And this delights me, even though I feel ashamed when my own rage comes to the surface. My anger doesn't signify courage; it's just more confirmation that I'm bad. — Kiera Van Gelder

My dad was all about music. He was a musician, leading a band when I was born. His band was active all through the 40s. He'd started it in the late 20s and 30s. According to the scrapbook, his band was doing quite well around the Boston area. During the Depression they were on radio. It was a jazz-oriented band. He was a trumpet player, and he wrote and arranged for the band. He taught me how to play the piano and read music, and taught me what he knew of standard tunes and so forth. It was a fantastic way to come up in music. — Chick Corea

I was never very good at picking cotton, and then I only made fifty cents or $1 a day. People would work for $1 a day during the Depression. So we would get $2 for playing music and just having fun. I think that as a result of that it was not just the money, but we enjoyed doing it. — Johnny Gimble

I would go into periods of depression in my life, and I would feel so alone. I felt that there was no one who understood how I felt, either on TV or in music, and writing really helped me change what I thought and how I felt about myself. — Brie Larson

Because ... most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don't have any of that. There's nothing between you and despair, and you don't seem a very desperate person.'
'Too stupid.'
'You're not stupid. So why don't you ever put your head in the oven?'
'I don't know. There's always a new Nirvana album to look forward to, or something happening in NYPD Blue to make you want to watch the next episode.'
'Exactly.'
'That's the point? NYPD Blue? Jesus.' It was worse than he thought.
'No, no. The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point. I don't know if you even realize it, but on the quiet you don't think life's too bad. You love things. Telly. Music. Food. — Nick Hornby

And I like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today-jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock and roll, hip hop and on and on- is derived from the blues. — Kurt Vonnegut

I believe you did not have a happy life.
I believe you were cheated.
I believe your best friends were loneliness and misery.
I believe your busiest enemies were anger and depression.
I believe joy was a game you could never play without stumbling.
I believe comfort, though you craved it, was forever a stranger.
I believe music had to be melancholy or not at all.
I believe no trinket, no precious metal, shone so bright as your bitterness.
I believe you lay down at last in your coffin none the wiser and unassuaged.
Oh, cold and dreamless under the wild, amoral, reckless, peaceful flowers of the hillsides. — Mary Oliver

There is always a piano in an hotel drawing-room, on which, of course, some one of the forlorn ladies is generally employed. I do not suppose that these pianos are, in fact, as a rule, louder and harsher, more violent and less musical, than other instruments of the kind. They seem to be so, but that, I take it, arises from the exceptional mental depression of those who have to listen to them. — Anthony Trollope

If I were you I'd put that away. See you're just wasted and thinking about the past again, darling you'll be okay. — Pierce The Veil

To combat the confusion and depression that assault me when I come off the road in the middle of a tour, I seek the most oblivionated music possible. When it's the 'way out there' that I seek, I go right to my stash of amazing music from Japan. — Henry Rollins

I suffered a bout of depression that pushed me to reevalute things in my life, and I learned a lot about myself and the world and my spirituality. I sat at a piano, and the ideas fell into my head. I started playing, and I felt comfortable with my music for the first time. — Matthew James Thomas

Perfume was first created to mask the stench of foul and offensive odors ...
Spices and bold flavorings were created to mask the taste of putrid and rotting meat ...
What then was music created for?
Was it to drown out the voices of others, or the voices within ourselves?
I think I know. — Emilie Autumn

Large-scale enthusiasm for folk music began in 1958 when the Kingston Trio recorded a song, "Tom Dooley," that sold two million records. This opened the way for less slickly commercial performers. Some, like Pete Seeger, who had been singing since the depression, were veteran performers. Others, like Joan Baez, were newcomers. It was conventional for folk songs to tell a story. Hence the idiom had always lent itself to propaganda. Seeger possessed an enormous repertoire of message songs that had gotten him blacklisted by the mass media years before. Joan Baez cared more for the message than the music, and after a few years devoted herself mainly to peace work. — William L. O'Neill

Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. — Vincent Van Gogh

I'd say, for me, it's cooking that gives me a space beyond music. I love food. And somehow, music and food go together so well. Cooking is very therapeutic. That preparation, the fragrance of spices, the wafting aromas - it just sweeps aside my depression, tiredness and name what you may. — Shreya Ghoshal

This mournful and restless sound was a fit accompaniment to my meditations. — Joseph Conrad

I grew up in the 1930s Great Depression when many families struggled to make ends meet, and in an area where old-fashioned country gospel music was popular. Later, as an adult with a more mature outlook on Christianity, I realized that a lot of that music was rather shallow. — Jerry Bridges

Great music is a great remedy for depression, but you have to drink it in with your heart and mind. — Debasish Mridha

I use the music to vent, and a lot of the stuff that I am writing about or was writing about contained a lot of anger and anxiety, stress and depression, so that's how the album came out so dark. — Vanilla Ice

You're in good spirits when you create and produce great music. All situations inspire music in different ways, man, from good situations, bad situations, depression, falling in love, falling out of love. I've been going through all those type of things. — Big Sean

Depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship [ ... ] feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibrating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news [ ... ] Grim situations were Katz's niche the way murky water was a carp's [ ... ] he might well have started making music again, had it not been for the accident of success. He flopped around on the ground, heavily carplike, his psychic gills straining futilely to extract dark sustenance from an atmosphere of approval and plenitude. — Jonathan Franzen

Like an attack this melancholy comes from time to time. I don't know at what intervals, and slowly covers my sky with clouds. It begins with an unrest in the heart, with a premonition of anxiety, probably with my dreams at night. People, houses, colors, sounds that otherwise please me become dubious and seem false. Music gives me a headache. All my mail becomes upsetting and contains hidden arrows. At such times, having to converse with people is torture and immediately leads to scenes ... Anger, suffering, and complaints are directed at everything, at people, at animals, at the weather, at God, at the paper in the book one is reading, at the material of the very clothing one has on. But anger, impatience, complaints and hatred have no effect on things and are deflected from everything, back to myself. — Hermann Hesse

It throbbed and pulsed, channeled by elemental forces of fear, love, hope, and sadness. The bow stabbed and flitted across the strings in a violent whorl of creation; its hairs tore and split until it seemed the last strands would sever in a scrape of dissonance. Those who saw the last fragile remnants held their breath against the breaking. The music rippled across the ship like a spirit, like a thing alive and eldritch and pregnant with mystery. The song held. More than held, it deepened. It groaned. It resounded in the hollows of those who heard. Then it softened into tones long, slow, and patient and reminded men of the faintest stars trembling dimly in defiance of a ravening dark. At the last, when the golden hairs of the bow had given all the sound they knew, the music fled in a whisper. Fin was both emptied and filled, and the song sighed away on the wind. — A.S. Peterson

I don't think I knew what depression was. I knew I felt funny sometimes and I was different. I think it's a musician thing. That's why I write music. You know, I'm not like some messed up person. There is a lot of people that suffer depression that don't have an outlet, you know what I mean? That can't pick up a guitar for an hour and feel better. — Amy Winehouse

Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images ... it bleeds relationships through suspicion, lack of confidence and self-respect, the inability to enjoy life, to walk or talk or think normally, the exhaustion, the night terrors, the day terrors. There is nothing good to be said for it except that it gives you the experience of how it must be to be old, to be old and sick, to be dying; to be slow of mind; to be lacking in grace, polish and coordination; to be ugly; to have no belief in the possibilities of life, the pleasures of sex, the exquisiteness of music or the ability to make yourself and others laugh. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The singer-songwriter has always played music that was stylistically rooted in the '30s and the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. But the fact of the matter is that none of us remember the Depression firsthand. — Steve Earle

The sound of the wind stretches its limbs.
The jazz music witholds some of its ruckus.
Hands move something in the dark.
I say: just an old romanticism...
No matter, the place will fit everything.

Vision descends upon flaccid pathways
and rides them on cheap metal.
Dried out trees and others take their water
from the drowned sand by force.
I say: a passing depression.
No matter, the place will fit everything.
During the day the sun approaches the mountain,
places its hand upon it,
its cold hand of lovers,
strikes stone with stone.
Mountain scrub dances behind the stone.
The sun does not see it.
Only the moon shines upon it all the way beyond the bend
and the guardian stones watch from afar.
I say: a passing coincidence.
No matter, the place will fit everything. — Ashur Etwebi

I didn't have any knowledge of the music industry when I first got to L.A., and I really didn't know on a creative level what I wanted to sound like, so I had to do a lot of experimenting. It led to a spiral of depression and being broke. — Skylar Grey

This sound, which like all music--indeed, like all pleasure--I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber, the voices and the nimble commotion, the perennial tribe of cats and dogs and birds, "laughter and ability and Sighing, And Frocks and Curls." All this I realized was more than I could ever abandon, even as what I had set out so deliberately to do was more than I could inflict on those memories, and upon those, so close to me, with whom the memories were bound. And just as powerfully I realized I could not commit this desecration on myself. — William Styron

She started beating it against the walls and floor until it was nothing but pieces, nothing but a memory of a guitar. I had an idea, though not yet clear, that it wasn't her arms that beat what once could sing, but her heavy heart, as she once said that even the Rock of Gibraltar had ten thousand holes. — Jackie Haze

Music is a science, it heals depression, it awakens, most people don't know, they just take music for an entertainment, something to dance to, and enjoy yourself and you go to bed and forget it tomorrow, music must never be forgotten, it's like a fountain that keeps on flowing — Peter Tosh

In Mexico, I first encountered the attitude that was missing from the optimistic sense of living in the United States: a tragic sense of life. Such a sense doesn't force us into a somber cone of depression and futility; it urges the opposite. The tragic sense opens a human being to the exuberant joys of the present. To laughter, carnal ity, the comical varieties of love, to music and art, to the small human glories of the day. — Pete Hamill

My guaranteed way of sending myself into deep depression is to read music trade papers and watch MTV. — Damon Albarn

And this pleasure, different from every other, had in the end created in him a need of her, which she alone, by her presence or by her letters, could assuage, almost as disinterested, almost as artistic, as perverse as another need which characterised this new period in Swann's life, where the sereness, the depression of the preceding years had been followed by a sort of spiritual superabundance, without his knowing to what he owed this unlooked-for enrichment of his life, any more than a person in delicate health who from a certain moment grows stronger, puts on flesh, and seems for a time to be on the road to a complete recovery: - this other need, which, too, developed in him independently of the visible, material world, was the need to listen to music and to learn to know it. — Marcel Proust