No. 131 - Beck’s “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” changed my life

Masha Makutonina swore off The Sims and found solace in the soundtrack to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Mar 06, 2026

This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Original Soundtrack

• 4 min read •

We don’t choose what catches us in a moment of deep grief, just as we don’t choose when tragedy finds us. Sometimes it arrives as a phone call from a morgue on a cold Monday evening in March while you’re playing The Sims on your parent’s desktop computer, unaware of life’s stakes and only concerned with building the best digital house for your ideal girl band.

At fourteen I was learning for the first time that people who are supposed to take care of you are struggling to take care of themselves, and things that are supposed to make sense feel more like decorations on a set that falls flat the minute you can’t support your participation in it. I also learned morgue secretaries are faster at making phone calls than hospitals or your parents.

When my grandmother passed away suddenly, I was left with my MP3 player and a lot of free time since I vowed not to play The Sims anymore to avoid summoning another family death — at least for that year. I would take long walks to Odesa’s seaside and put my player on shuffle, hoping to hear something that would temporarily fill the emptiness I felt right below my heart. Of the ten songs I downloaded that month, one perfectly scored the scene as I traced cold, misty circles in the sand with my winter boots.

The beach Masha walked in Odesa, Ukraine. In Cyrillic, “Climbing is forbidden, and so is looking into the horizon with sad eyes.”

My parents didn’t introduce me to their favorite musical artists and never made me listen to their record collection. Not that they had one. Nor did they show me movies they liked, which encouraged my solo exploration of all things art and heavily contributed to feelings of resentment when I came across people marinated in their parents’ taste. It’s like meeting people who learned how to cook from their family; undeniably and enviably sexy, and they don’t even deserve the full credit. I was on my own with Google and the illegal film library of the VK platform, where I found Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and promptly downloaded its soundtrack onto my player some time before my grandmother’s death.

My best music discoveries would continue to come from films, and later, in college, a professor would say it’s a cheap directorial trick to increase emotion in a scene that doesn’t rise there on its own. But like every fourteen-year-old, I thought life itself didn’t rise to the required level of emotion on its own, and so I’d download these soundtrack pieces for personal scoring opportunities. It helped that both my life and this sad Jim Carrey film featured cold walks on the beach.

If you listen to the Korgis’ original version of “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime,” it has all the elements of a sad love ballad that you can still slow dance to. It reminds me of 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love,” and in that way feels more romantic than sorrowful. The version I discovered was a cover by Beck that strips down the ’80s elements of the original to a haunting minimalism. The first fifteen seconds draw you into a somber collection of chords that feel like a symphony of hung-up landline phone calls. To this day, they make me feel like I can hear my own heartbeat in a very crowded space. It’s exactly the feeling of having your world upended and sewn back down while you try to connect with reality.

Then Beck’s husky vocals come in to really drive home the after-the-punch feeling in your guts. We are starting in a pretty empty place, but slowly other instruments come in and the guitar strings add a sweetness that allows for feelings of grief to emerge over initial shock. At least that’s how it felt in my body at that age. The drums add a sense of marching strength and the comforting “mmhhmmh” Beck adds at the end of some lines is a great self-soothing trick I picked up as well. I don’t want to say this piece of music taught me to grieve, but I can’t remember anything else that held me at the time.

I had just started to take my English lessons more seriously and was determined to learn all the lyrics to the songs I was listening to. This one was easy enough for me not to Google. On a general note, I recommend grieving in another language, as it makes things feel much more manageable. You can kind of use the distance of the words to cushion the blow. You can use it as an isolation cord for the open electrical circuit that is your mind and body in the wake of loss.

That cold March turned into a cold April and eventually into a warm May. I watched a different movie and downloaded the next soundtrack onto my MP3 player. I skipped “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” for the next ten years with occasional exceptions for the death anniversary. Listening to it recently, though, I realized that over time I’ve grown capable of being more present with the grief that this song first taught me to bear. Mirroring the song’s structure, I now see it as a hopeful reminder of the love I felt for someone who is long, long gone. The pain has subsided into an honoring. ◆

About Masha

Masha Makutonina is a Ukrainian videomaker, playwright, and audio producer from Odesa, Ukraine, now residing in New York. She has acted in NYU’s production of The Clear Blue Skies: Diaries from Ukraine. Her play Steppe, which she wrote and directed, has had a three-show run as a part of the Global Form Theatre Festival at Rattlestick Theatre in June 2023. Her play They Are Quits was a part of 938 Collective’s Short Play Festival at Dixon Theatre as well as Secret Theatre’s short play competition in summer of 2024. Her short film was recently screened at the 938 Collective’s showing at Cobble Hill cinema. Masha loves exploring hopeless futures of spaces and characters that are brought into dialogue by them.

Website mashamakutonina.neocities.org

Instagram @masha_makut

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