Taylor Swift’s latest album Midnights launched with the single Anti-Hero. Anti-heroes in fiction are dark, complex characters who may question their moral compass but are ultimately trying to be led by their good intentions.

Perhaps most humans feel like we are all anti-heroes lacking the right amount of courage, idealism, and morality — wanting to be heroic but struggling through familiar dark places.

In Anti-Hero, Taylor shares emotional rawness and sings “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me … everybody agrees.”

“I don’t think I’ve delved this far into my insecurities in this detail before,” Swift said about the song in a video on Instagram. “I struggle a lot with the idea that my life has become unmanageably sized and, not to sound too dark, I struggle with the idea of not feeling like a person.”

Why do musicians revisit their pain and doubt in their art?

Taylor’s album reveals her struggle with her own insecurities and maybe common universal human emotions that everyone struggles to face. In Labyrinth, for example, she sings about heartbreak, and more specifically, the fear of falling in love again:

It only feels this raw right now/ Lost in the labyrinth of my mind/ Break up, break free, break through, break down.

Much of the new album, and Swift’s discography in general, often revisits past heartbreaks, disappointments and insecurities. Swift has talked about how Midnights is an album devoted to the kinds of soul-searching thoughts we have in the middle of the night.

Music and pain

Music has the potential to change our experience of intrusive thoughts and how we deal with pain. At an extreme level, when we revisit past traumatic experiences, we are often in danger of triggering a fear response, that manifests as either fight/flight/freeze or fawn, that can often re-traumatise individuals.

When we identify with a song that expresses similar struggles to what we are experiencing, we feel understood and not judged. Clinical psychologist Dr Janina Fisher has proposed that distancing ourselves from pain helps humans survive, yet an ongoing “self-alientation” of parts of ourselves that carries fear or shame lead to a disowning of self — the bad parts that Taylor relates to as being the things she hates about herself — which causes a further suppression of feelings that can create further psychological distress.

Expression is central to releasing emotion and connecting to music may be the key that allows the disowned parts of self to be re-integrated by expressing them in a new way. Music provides a creative outlet to re-script a new story of survival of the fear of the past with a renewed ability to see the good things again in life.

Musicians often imbue grief and trauma in their lyrics and melodies as autobiographical reflections into their art as a way of working through complex emotions and feelings — and by doing so, enlighten the listener to work through their own pain.

Music and connection

Music seems to be a way for music lovers to connect with artists’ stories of tragedy, which allows their own traumatic or painful memories to become more comfortably integrated and accepted.

The depth of loathing that Taylor taps into in Anti-Hero also affirms our own experience.

It’s self-confirming. Engaging with trauma in art allows us to rewrite the outcome, from being victims of our circumstances to victors. We are either consumers or creators.

Mental health and music

A musician’s writing about trauma is a way of increasing mental health — of searching for understanding of themselves through self-reflection. It changes old thinking patterns and provides a new perspective and ways of thinking about themselves and others that can often heal emotional wounds.

Like telling your story through a trauma narrative, music can help reduce its emotional impact. Music is a universal language that gives you the chance to be a protagonist in your life story, to see yourself as living through it heroically. Humans need to feel safe and in connection with others for survival, and music is the language that activates pleasure centres in the brain and communicates powerful emotions.

If trauma causes distress to the brain and body and music enhances psychological wellbeing, improves mood, emotions, reduces pain, anxiety, depression and chronic stress, music has the potential to alleviate chronic disease and pain.

Music is a vehicle that gathers strength from distress, and helps you grow brave by reflections. And maybe the anti-hero’s insecurities, recreated through music, may be the treasures found in darkness that we may not have seen in the light.

The writer is an Assistant Professor at Bond University in Australia
Republished from The Conversation

Published in Dawn, ICON, December 11th, 2022