Some songs I favor while gently high

Monday reading #7

Monday Reading is my weekly recommendation of something I’ve found thought-provoking or fascinating. Sometimes it is about food or music or projects I care about supporting. Sometimes I do not send it on Monday. Please share with anyone who might like the vibes!!

I have been receiving ketamine treatments for depression for almost two years. The treatments take a couple of hours—I go to the office, take the medication (a nose spray) and can leave two hours later.  Does it work? Kinda.

It’s not, as I understand it, much like taking … the real drug? It’s a proprietary formula that uses only part of the ketamine molecule so that it doesn’t cause the same reaction. You definitely feel different; for the first 40 minutes or so, it’s physically  like being a little drunk, but my mind is clear. It’s a little trippy, though, which is most obvious when I close my eyes, so that’s what I usually do—put on an eye mask, put on headphones, and get gently high.

It took some trial and error to find music to listen to. Nothing too upbeat, nothing distractingly unfamiliar. For a while I only listened to instrumental music and a couple of mostly instrumental Sigur Ros songs (which is how I ended up taking a very expensive 40th birthday trip to Iceland that I am still paying for and, in that regard, regret). Complicated stuff that I could really listen to, lots of Zoe Keating and repeated patterns to fill that groove.

Sometimes the high is way more pronounced, and in those cases the music matters a lot. Once I listened to Shawn Colvin’s cover of “This Must Be the Place” and ended up in a grief-filled k-hole crying about my mom’s death … which was … fifteen years ago. Yikes. I also got very fucking high when I had a cold one week, because my nasal passages were all scratched up and I absorbed more of the medication. I don’t remember what I was listening to, but I was DMing when it hit and truly, it felt like my brain was melting and the … buttons weren’t working? I don’t know. Sometimes I text my friends that I love them a lot and then text “oh, I’m at ketamine, sorry, I mean I meant it but also I’m high” ten minutes later

Anyway, lately I have been listening to this Fred Again.. song “Dermot (See Yourself in My Eyes)” on repeat. I am one of those people who can listen to the same song dozens of times in a row even when not on ketamine, and this one is pretty good for that purpose.

I heard this song on Shrinking—the guy’s daughter plays it for him. She tells him it’s her soccer team’s hype up song before games, which … I don’t know. It seems sort of awkward for a hype song in terms of the timing—it starts pretty slow, it’s almost 30 seconds of Dermot’s lyrics with Fred Again.. playing piano over it before the drum machine kicks in, and there’s a break in the middle, actually not in the middle, but 2/3 of the way through! where the drum machine stops and the guitars stop and the piano drops out and there’s this clip of Young Thug saying “Fall in love with someone that enjoys your weirdness, not someone that tries to talk you into being normal,” before all the stuff that had been layered over the song comes back up. It’s sort of weird for a hype song!!

But I can also see teenage girls singing/yelling it to each other, together: “if only you could see yourself in my eyes/ if only you could see yourself in my eyes/ all this was was all about you/ about you/you’d see you shine/ you shine,” and one of the great things about it is that he’s stripped all of the story from the original song so it’s just that fragment, it’s not the desperate man’s desperate love. So maybe it’s a good hype song. Who can say.

I guess Fred Again.. is a nepo baby (Brian Eno was his neighbor?) but whatever. He did this actually incredible Tiny Desk concert, producing and playing the songs live.

Sometimes these emails are just recommendations, and sometimes they’re something else. I think that’s fine.

P.S. Another song I listen to during ketamine treatments:

P.P.S.: