Published at 8:00 AM on February 8, 2010

Listen Up: Playing "The Circle Game" (and Other Unlistenables)

Listen Up: Playing "The Circle Game" (and Other Unlistenables)

Photo by Robert Altman

Y'all, I'm tired. I'm tired of talking about ideas. Let's talk about feelings instead!

Here, I'll go first: The night before I left for college, I sat on the floor of my bedroom at my parents' house and listened to Joni Mitchell and cried.

(Yeah, feelings! Told you!)

The song was “The Circle Game” and I don't remember if it was on the burned copy of Ladies of the Canyon that my cousin Marie gave me or if it was just one of the many weird old MP3s I'd downloaded from Kazaa around that time (see also: Joe Jackson's "Is She Really Going Out With Him?" and Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir," once I realized it wasn't "Cashmere"). Either way, I played it a lot around that time, along with “Both Sides Now,” because I was a Smart, Sensitive Young Lady Finding Myself In The World and I guess that's just what you do? Earlier in the summer I'd recognized it as timely and poignant—an apropos, gently-strummy anthem to what I figured then was the last summer of my youth:

And the seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round in the circle game

But that night, the song and its damned painted ponies plowed me over as if I'd never heard it before. I bawled and bawled, and then went to sleep, and woke up and moved away. And every time I tried to listen to that song again in the following weeks and months, I just couldn't do it. My hands would ache and my face would crinkle and my throat would close up and my eyes would get hot, and my thoughts would go from AHH MY CHILDHOOD IS OVER to AHH I AM GOING TO DIE LIKE REALLY REALLY SOON all in the two seconds it took for me to hit stop. I soon developed a kind of paranoia about it, too, afraid that I'd overhear it at a department store or a restaurant and lose my shit in public. Unfortunately its opening bars sound like a whole lot of other Joni Mitchell songs, and I swear, you do not realize how often you hear Joni Mitchell out in the world until you are near-deathly afraid of hearing Joni Mitchell out in the world. I couldn't even listen to Ladies of the Canyon anymore because invariably I would forget "The Circle Game" was the last track and then it would sneak up on me and stab me in the heart, that bitch.

I was physically unable to listen to the song because it made me so incapacitated with sadness. This is weird because I cry about music so much! I mean, just the other night I was driving to meet some friends for dinner and drinks and I was listening to Taylor Swift because it seemed like the thing to do, but then right in the middle of “Love Story” I noticed the road was getting blurry and I couldn't breathe and, ah, it's because my eyes were filled with tears and I was holding back a giant shuddery sob and I have no idea why other than that it was just really sweet, I guess? This was before the Grammys, too, so these were not tears of pride or loathing or why-can't-she-sing-on-pitch or I-want-that-blue-dress. They were just tears, tears I did my best to keep in my eyeholes because I'd actually bothered to put on makeup that night and was really interested in not looking like a sad Fall Out Boy fan at dinner. And I succeeded! But if it had been “The Circle Game” I probably would have had to pull over, weep for twenty minutes on the side of the road, turn around, drive home, change into pajamas and abuse myself back into reality with whatever show about sad rich people marathon Bravo chose to stock its Saturday night with.

So I thought, at least. Because then I decided that I was going to write about this song and how I can't listen to it, and that seemed like reason enough to deliberately attempt to listen to it for the first time in years and years, and when I did that, of course, I had no problem with it. I queued it up at work—where I have cried over music many times before—pulled on my headphones, hit play and... well, nothing. I just sat there and listened to it. My chest felt a little tight but there was no lip-trembling or knuckle-biting or immediate thoughts of death or anything.

In a way I'm kind of sad about that, actually—that I'm no longer sad about something I was sad about when I was eighteen! Am I a grown-up now? Or have I just entered into some weird phase of meta-nostalgia? Either way, I can now safely walk into any local coffee shop or open-mic night without fear! And I can now pull Ladies of the Canyon from my freshman-year CD case and rip it to my iPod and put that shit on shuffle without trepidation! Hell, I might even go to Lilith Fair this summer! (Just kidding, I was totally gonna go anyway.)

This is such a great feeling that I would like to encourage you, dear reader, to confront your personal equivalent of “The Circle Game.” Yes, now it's your turn: What song can't you sit through, and why? Think about it, then do it. Cry if you need to, let your stomach turn, but just suck it up and I'm pretty sure you'll feel better at the end of those three minutes. When you're done, leave your story in the comments and we'll all talk about our feelings together!

Feelings!

Rachael Maddux is Paste’s associate editor. Her column appears at PasteMagazine.com every Monday.

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