No. 007 - Of Montreal's "Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse" changed my life
High school drudgery, a diary shoplifted from Borders, and the song that helped Willem Helf realize he wasn't alone
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This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created by Grace Lilly, supported by readers.
• 5 min read •
On my first day of high school I was shat on by a seagull. I remember, still, scurrying off to the bathroom, staring dully at my reflection in the sickly yellow overhead light and desperately trying to wipe off the gushy bird excrement that dribbled down the hoodie I’d put on that morning for good luck. Well this is just great, I thought, I hope it’s not some sort of omen.
Seventeen years later, I still think it may have been. My freshman year of high school saw me rapidly sinking from the great highs of eighth grade into a deep, dissociative sludge of depression: seemingly out of nowhere, I suddenly felt as if I were trapped in a bog of self-loathing and hopelessness, sucked into a void that I could not flail my way out of; every day was tinted gray, suffused with a deadness too painful and difficult for me to put into words.
What is wrong with me? I constantly wondered, scribbling frantically in the little diary I’d shoplifted from Borders Books. I used to be so happy but now I’m just sad and angry all the time! What the hell is going on?
And then in 2007 Of Montreal dropped a new album, Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? A longtime fan, I bought myself a copy of the CD, stuck it in my boombox, and cranked up the volume as high as my parents would allow. When the song “Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse” came on, my ears pricked up:
I’m in a crisis, I need help
Come on mood shift, shift back to good again
Come on mood shift, shift back to good again
Come on, be a friend
The song features Kevin Barnes, the lead singer of Of Montreal, spending three minutes and eighteen seconds begging the chemicals in his brain to be good, to do what he needs them to do, the refrain “come on, chemicals” drilling in again and again his sheer desperation.
The song itself is manic, saturated with layers of fast-paced synths and Barnes’s crooning voice; written in a major key, it’s easy to mistake for yet another goofy Of Montreal track if you don’t pay attention to the lyrics themselves.
But I paid attention, and the words hit me so hard that I felt my eyes well up with tears: it’s not just me. Someone else knows what this feels like. This sucks, god, this SUCKS, but at least someone else out there gets it!
Certainly a very “fourteen-year-old” thought, one that several years later I’d see plastered all over Tumblr: you are not alone. In that moment, though, sitting isolated in my room with the shades drawn, encased in a darkness that felt both self-imposed and not, I dearly, desperately needed the sentiment.
There were other people who woke up every morning thinking please, please don’t let me feel like shit today, who were again and again disappointed when they did, who were at the mercy of what, years later, I would call “bad brain.” The song did not fix my depression – for certainly it was depression, of the chemical sort – but it did reach out a tendril, gently showing me that other people had dealt with these feelings too.
For a long time I did not think about high school. Years later there would be a diagnosis, treatment, medications, but looking back on my teenage years felt like willingly slipping back into a brackish pool of ugly former feelings. Why bother with that when I was desperately working on feeling better, crawling slowly forward, doing what I could to not be dogged by misery day after day?
But it has been seventeen years now. My days are colorful again, and I know what to do when I feel the old sludge beginning to overtake me. Treatment works when the treatment is good, and I have been very lucky.
I am now able to look back at my younger self with tenderness, even a little bit of fondness: I was struggling then, stuck in a headspace that I was ill-equipped to deal with by myself, and my sadness was not self-imposed but rather brought on by my circumstances and a brain that did not agree with me.
Come on, chemicals – a prayer, a lament that helped high-school me understand that things weren’t entirely hopeless. Difficult, but not hopeless. I have “Heimdalsgate” to thank for that realization, one that has kept me going for years now: the mood shift can, in fact, shift back to good again. ◆
About Willem
Willem Helf is a coder and writer who lives in New York. He writes a Substack called On Stuff and has written for The New Inquiry, The Outline, and others.
Instagram @willem_helf
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