Fade Away— Lotte Kestner

#365Songs: April 9th

I can recall my first panic attack in vivid detail, as if from a scene in a film I’ve watched a hundred times. Voices hollowed while atmospheric sounds echoed, everything exaggerated — small details all at once compounding in a head now claustrophobic. Heart rate a rapid drum rattle: badoombadoombadroom badabadabadaboom. The air siphoned from the room, no oxygen left to breathe, airwaves tightened. Suffocation, numbness, the final seconds of life.

There is no such thing as a solitary panic attack because once you know they exist you forever anticipate the unpredictable arrival of another. And I had dozens, then hundreds of shorter aftershocks. ER psych visits, endless Xanax, fear of straying too far from home.

This was my life for one long year in my early ’20s, when I was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people living a life that didn’t feel like mine. 9/11 was barely in the rearview, the possibility of terror lingered in every corner, every headline a warning. I was unemployed, uninspired, and for the first time in my adult life aware how quickly everything can become unhinged.

People often mistake anxiety for panic. Anxiety is a nervous system response to a perceived threat — that feeling of being chased, pre-presentation nerves, one too many bong hits, a hard conversation, underemployment— whereas a panic attack is an all-inclusive mind and body shutdown.

Over time, I’ve learned to manage panic — even in the moments after my Mom died, during my young son’s 7-minute febrile seizure, and despite break-ups, layoffs, funerals, and all of life’s hardest and most unexpected experiences. I’ve trained my brain to know that panic isn’t real, that I’m not dying even if it feels that way. A panic attack is a cognitive misperception, a physiological response to a mental over-reaction.

I wish I could say the same of anxiety, a state of being that persists, an emotional ghost that haunts me from within — a spirit I’ve battled my entire life. Though that ghost is never quiet for long, I’ve learned a few tricks to appease it.

Reading removes me from myself, sends me out into other worlds, reminds me I’m not alone; meditation resurfaces my breath, puts me at rest; walking reconnects me to my senses, the way fog feels against skin as it swallows the city, the scent of blooming flowers, the sounds of life in action; and there’s music, always music, as it reignites my emotions, soundtracks my re-entry to a functioning human.

It’s been 23 years since my first panic attack, and the same artist that was there for me that night — in the hours after my ER discharge — has been there through every bout of aggravated anxiety to this day.

I discovered Trespassers William in the late ’90s during a time when my love for collecting sad songs seeded itself as a terminal passion. Playlist after playlist populated with Sparklehorse, Damien Jurado, Red House Painters, Low, Mojave 3, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Talk Talk, Pedro the Lion, Leonard Cohen, Jason Molina, and the list has bloated into the thousands over the years. This is the music that calms my nervous system, a constant reminder that to feel is to live, that what resides within that melancholy is the same beauty that moves us forward.

Trespassers William released three great dream-pop albums between 1997 and 2006. Lead vocalist Anna-Lynne Williams has been recording under the moniker Lotte Kestner ever since, with several albums of original songs, remixes, and covers. Her entire catalog lives within one playlist that I play on random when I write, meditate, and anytime my nervous system requires a reset. There’s something in her voice, in her vibrato, that lowers my heart-rate, something in these songs that calms my spirit, that lifts me out of my inward-spiral and recolors the world again.

Sad songs do that to me, they uplift me, a reminder that to feel anything at all is to be alive.

Spotify reminds me each December of how deep this obsession flows, and for the past three years I’ve been in Lotte Kestner’s top 0.003% of listeners. Thousands of minutes, year after year. It’s almost embarrassing at this point.

I don’t have a favorite song in this catalog because I always listen on shuffle, but I always begin with one of these songs: Lie in the Sound by Trespassers William, and then Lotte’s Wrestler, Fade Away, and two songs with Damien Jurado accompanying, Turn the Wolves and Falling Snow.

We live in anxious times, a world on fire with genocide, pandemic, rising Fascism, and political movements threatening to reverse basic human rights for queer, immigrant, and non-White communities. We need to rise up more often, fight back, but we also need to slow down, put our phones down, and calm our nervous systems. So try something with me: play Lotte Kestner on random, lay down on your back, close your eyes, and breathe.

Let the calm take over.

Seems like time goes in reverse sometimes
In the dark
Either side of your face
The ghost of bones

Sundown
Everyone return to your nest
White lights are only making shadows
In your chest

What if all your colors fade away
And no one decodes all the notes on the page
What if there is no one there to say
“The morning has come”
Does it come anyway

We all have our own kind of ache after all
How can something feel like it’s nothing at all

Sundown
Everything’s returned to its place
Does the silence make an echo
Soft as lace

What if all your colors fade away
And no one decodes all the words on the page
What if there is no one there to say
“The morning has come”
Does it come anyway