Prozac fundamentally altered how I listen to music

Now I'm relearning how to enjoy music

I can’t be the only music nerd who’s related to that scene in High Fidelity, where John Cusack’s character, Rob, stays in for the night to completely reorganize his record collection. He doesn’t do it chronologically or alphabetically, but autobiographically, which he tells another character, Dick, that it’s “comforting.” Dick is so enticed by this that he offers to help. It was never stated that Rob or Dick had OCD, but it sure seemed OCD-coded to me.

I don’t knock on the wall eight times before opening the door. I organize. I do it excessively. And I tend to do it in unimportant areas of my life. I do a lot of my organizing through how I listen to music. Like Rob, I find it soothing to create order through my music. It washes away all of the thoughts in my brain. I love music, but even more, I love the relief I get from keeping long lists of albums I need to listen to and creating complex systems to decide my next album up. No questions. Just follow the rules.

It makes listening to music both an obsessive hobby and a productive task, which I tell myself is not a time-waster, but a way I am enriching myself and deepening my knowledge in music. To what end? Sure, I write about music, and it comes in handy, but who really needs all these music history factoids swimming around in their head? I try not to consider it too carefully.

I don’t knock on the wall eight times before opening the door. I organize. I do it excessively.

That’s the C (compulsion) part of the equation, but what is the O (obsession) I’m trying to escape? No, it’s not the music I’m obsessed with. That is the distraction. What keeps my mental wheels spinning is non-stop worrying and intrusive thoughts. My worries range from the boring (How will I pay my mortgage if I lose my job?) to the absurd (What if I lose control and start French kissing everyone I see?!)

It’s like a tiny, frantic hamster, spinning on an endless, worried wheel.

All this thinking about music and organizing it via complex lists keeps my brain occupied enough to lower the intrusive thoughts. But it doesn’t entirely shut them out. No, that is done with a different technique involving music. I try to find the most intensely emotional music I can find (usually about death, because what’s more emotional than death?)

I surround myself with emotional, death music. I bask in other people’s grief. Some of my favorites are Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me, a dark, blunt album about grieving his wife, who died of cancer, Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie and Lowell, where he unravels his complex relationship with his mother after she passes away, and Warren Zevon’s The Wind, an album he wrote as he was knowingly dying. It’s a unique feeling when you focus so clearly on death that you are momentarily enlightened to the point of floating above your body, and are probably saying something cliché like, “Life is short,” and “I am blessed to have this moment right now.” And in that moment, it feels so real and feels so good.

I bask in the emotion of grief and stare into the abyss of life and cry my guts out, which seems to be the only damn thing that shuts up my brain. It’s music that gets me there. So, thank you, music. You truly have given me so much.

I try to find the most intensely emotional music I can find (usually about death, because what’s more emotional than death?)

But then a year ago, at 49 years, after 3 years of tiptoeing towards the topic in therapy, I decided to try Prozac, to see if it could help lower my obsessive worries. Actually, I tried Zoloft 6 months earlier and hated the way it made me feel. My therapist encouraged me to try Prozac instead. I did so with much trepidation.

And it worked.

Within days, I was already noticing my brain having moments of peace. Peace that didn’t require massive amounts of emotional negotiation to get there. Just natural peace. One day, about a week into taking Prozac, I was driving to the print shop to pick up some flyers. I was going through my usual complex music listening system (I won’t bore you with the details, but it involves the number 8), and I stopped. I didn’t want to listen to music that way. I wanted to listen to Chappell Roan’s “Too Hot To Go” and rock out.

I can’t tell you how much fun I had on that drive, and how unusual it was for me. I was listening to music I wanted for no reason other than wanting to, and I was feeling…good. Not a care in the world.

I haven’t completely divorced myself from my music listening systems. But I don’t feel as committed to them as I once was. I might go with them one day or veer away from them the next. Sometimes I think I stick to the compulsion out of habit. But the most noticeable thing is that my relationship to music has changed.

I can’t put my finger on how, but it’s not the same.

A side effect of the Prozac is that it blunts my emotions. They’re there, but they take a little bit more work to get to than they used to. It’s a small price to pay to dim my worried thoughts. But it also makes music less intense. I’ve spent my whole life revolving my world around music, and now I feel like I don’t entirely understand its role in my life any longer.

I still very much enjoy music. But I feel like I’m craving something different from it. I still can get emotional listening to an intense song, but I don’t feel like I’m desperately wanting an emotional song to hammer me over the head to force me to cry. Occasionally, the music brings me to tears, but when it happens, it just feels like a moment. Not a transformative reminder of my humanity.

I feel some confusion about whether I should abandon my system altogether, because music is still my hobby, and I don’t know a different way to engage with my hobby.

I’ve spent my whole life revolving my world around music, and now I feel like I don’t entirely understand its role in my life any longer.

Something new to me. I’ve been vibing to music. Just listening to music and digging the feel of the song as a pleasant moment in the day. Nothing fantastic. Just nice, which strikes me as an odd way to listen to music.

There seems to be a different kind of music that I’m craving. It is, for a lack of a better word, spiritual. I want to feel something greater than me that consumes me, but not in an emotionally devastating way. I want to feel the magic of the universe through music. Get a glimpse of the unknowable and taste it momentarily before I continue with my day. Half Waif’s 2024 record, See You at the Maypole, is a record that touches this vibe for me. Or Imogen Heap’s 2005 album Speak for Yourself. Or the Hadestown Original soundtrack. I feel like for a moment, I’m listening to God, a big deal for an atheist.

It’s not about the words, which is new for me. It’s the feeling of the album. The record that has felt the most spiritually fantastic to me is Rosalia’s fantastic 2025 album, Lux. It’s so beautiful and magical. Every time I get to the last song on the record, I let out a small cry. But I’m not reckoning with the infinite pain of the universe. I feel filled with the possibility of life. I love that feeling. It’s new for me.

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Oh hey, I wrote a book about ska that you should absolutely purchase! Grab it on Amazon, Bookshop.org or wherever you normally get your books.