Love Songs/Drug Songs: A playlist of heartache and intoxication

When I used to only listen to punk rock and drink vodka out of water bottles, I hated love songs so much that I got John Mayer banned from being played at the restaurant where I worked. Instead of “waiting  on the world to change,” I got all of my friends to come in and write complaint cards about how everything was incredible except for the amount of John Mayer they’d been subjected to. After about a week, I never had to listen to that damn song again. As I became more of an addict, if the song wasn’t about some internal pain and coping with drugs, I lost interest. Love songs were like watching a happy couple chase a butterfly into a house fire; picture-perfect until you remember the divorce rate and what custody battles look like.

In recovery, people told me that healing from addiction is about learning how to love again: learning how to love yourself enough to go to sleep every night, to be present and honest in each moment, to put your faith in yourself and other people instead of chemicals. I started trying to find music to soundtrack that process and it turns out I actually like a lot of love songs.

Making this playlist, I realized my problem with love songs is the narrow scope that often defines them. Drug songs can be about a party, getting high alone, a hangover, getting sober, or a whole other spectrum of stories, but love songs are usually just considered to be romantic confessions or pinings. I have a girlfriend now, so I sometimes break down and get mushy and send her one of those kinds of songs. But usually, the songs that turn me on are about some other kind of love: loving the thing about yourself other people may hate you for (“The Queer Gospel,” by Erin McKeown), the love of a child watching someone they love be harmed (“Hair Match” by the Mountain Goats), having enough love and care to keep fighting (“Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of Your Fist” by Ramshackle Glory). Romantic love rules and all, but the kind of love I have had to learn is a verb like ‘care’ or ‘tend’ more than a state of wanting to smooch or deep longing.

So here it is, a playlist that tells a story about getting sober and learning what love can look like. The first bit is almost all songs I have addict memories with, like a painfully stereotypical moment, high in the backseat listening to “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” where I finally ‘got’ Tom Waits. The middle are transitional songs, “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” being my latest sobriety  anthem. The last bit are love songs, and the last song is specifically for Tammy, an old tweaker I met in the hospital who would be so happy to know that I am currently living thirty minutes away from her favorite truck stop. I hope wherever you’ve been holed up over quarantine you’ve felt somebody’s love and are safe and stable. This will end and then we can all hug and cry together but until then: dance, nobody’s watching.