With her new album Songwrights Apothecary Lab, Spalding offers up a collection of songs for “releasing the heaviness of a seemingly endless blue state,” for “steadying the vast-spinning ‘potential hurt’ analysis triggered by the bliss of new romance,” and for “slowing down and remembering to make space/time for your elders.” Spalding made clear that this way of “musicking” is nothing new:
Over the course of her career, Esperanza Spalding has reimagined the music-making process - transforming it from one designed to meet her label’s commercial needs to one designed to meet the mental-health needs of her immediate community. In the second half of today’s episode, we talk to an artist who has taken the concept of music as medicine to a whole new level.
Alex sees his job as guiding the scientific community toward new data that could change how we understand the value of pop-music lyrics - “laying the railroad ties,” as he puts it. “People like to point at pop music as a source of problems, not a source of solutions,” he says. Alex’s research, and research like it, opens up the possibility that pop artists are an underestimated asset when it comes to mental-health messaging. In today’s episode, we walk through one of those studies with him and learn how influential lyrical content can be - even when you’re not paying super-close attention. candidate at the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media who has authored a bunch of studies on mental health and popular music. It made her want to know more about the impact of those lyrics, so she dug around and found an academic who studies that very thing: Alex Kresovich, a Ph.D. When Megan hit an especially low point earlier this year, she noticed something in the music she was listening to: Über-popular artists making explicit references to the state of their mental health and the things they do to cope with it.
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