The music that saved my life

I’m not the first person to say that music is the answer or that it saved my life. These two sets aren’t just sets that I like a lot or speak to me in some manner. I’ve been moved by a lot of music in a lot of different ways. But this? This is different. I’m pretty sure I would be dead in a literal sense without it.

Fideles

It’s sometime in late December, 2020. The first covid winter has arrived, the world was silent. A collective breath is held, prayers are sent. Will grandma be alive when spring comes? Mao-Lin, who I started dating that October, was away for the holidays. It has been a year since I spent Christmas 2019 single and alone, sleeping on an air mattress in my new apartment in Manhattan.

My thoughts were slowly becoming darker and darker, bit by bit. What the actual fuck had this last year been? How can this be my reality, I asked. My family never really did holidays growing up. We never really did much of anything as a unit.

These thoughts kept swirling around in my head so I turned on YouTube, looking for a distraction. I was tired of the music I had been listening to and wanted something different. I went deeper into the Cercle archives and found the set Fideles did in France in 2019. I liked the vibe after finishing it and went searching for more they had done. That’s when I found their set for Creative State.

I was instantly hooked, watching it like a Super Bowl final drive for the win. Everyone was dancing in place, a small space around them. The room was dark and the lights were haunting. It was an ode to our time. It kept building this emotional intensity, backing off just enough to throw you off kilter. It felt like an optical illusion, the mind’s cavernous thoughts portrayed as a small fragment in time. A man started singing:

We save ourselves, we hide away
From this pack of lies, just one more day
For the longest time we've come undone
You can feel it in the air, the summer's gone

It was the Fidèles remix of Golden, which become my favorite song of the moment and is now what I consider to be my favorite song of all time.

Over the next 2-3 weeks, as I teetered around in the closest I would ever get to breaking my sobriety. I kept returning to that set. It became a way to focus the sadness in my life through a medium of some sort. Some people listen to sad music when they’re sad and make the whole situation worse. I used to have a friend who would listen to Sarah Mclachlan every time he was sad and then complain about he was getting sadder. The call is coming from inside the house, my dear.

But this wasn’t that. This was channeling how I felt in a dark time through an avenue for self expression. The thread line to my death on an alternate timeline is simple: I buy a bottle of wine, telling myself just once is ok. Then another. Then another. I scream and rage and wish things were different. I stumble off my roof, or into the Hudson nearby, or into traffic out front. So sad, they will say. Pathetic is what they will whisper quietly.

But that didn’t happen. This set came along and changed the arch of my existence. Fidèles has been on most playlists for my friends, and this is why. I’m just a boy from Maine and those two from Italy are why I’m alive today.

BLOND:ISH

Coming soon