I could not get enough of it. Like a lot of teenagers in the mid-1980s I found ways to keep the melodies close at all times. The cassette in the Walkman. The album cover memorized. The songs running through my head in the spaces between classes and the long hours of a season that had more empty spaces than I knew how to fill.
My parents were divorcing. My high school had recently closed, which meant a new school, a new building, new hallways, and none of the childhood friendships that had been the quiet infrastructure of my daily life. Those friendships were not dramatically ended. They were simply no longer available in the way they had always been, and the absence of them left a particular kind of loneliness that a teenager does not quite have words for. The loneliness of a world that has rearranged itself without consulting you.
I was isolated and confused and navigating all of it with only the skills a sixteen-year-old carries into a season he was not prepared for.
And then this album arrived.
What Songs From The Big Chair did for me was not what music is supposed to do according to the conventional understanding. It did not distract me from what I was feeling. It did not offer an escape from the difficulty of that season. It did something more honest and more necessary than either of those things.
It sat with me in it.
The melodies and harmonies carried something I recognized without being able to name. The lyrics of many of the songs felt written for the specific interior landscape I was learning to inhabit, the confusion, the longing, the particular ache of being young and already acquainted with loss and not having anyone around who seemed to understand that the two things could coexist in the same chest at the same time.
The album was like a campfire in my young inner-wilderness. Not a campfire that made the wilderness disappear or that transformed it into something more comfortable. A campfire that simply burned in the middle of it, providing enough light and enough warmth to make the wilderness bearable. To make it, in some unexpected way, companionable.
I did not feel fixed by that album. I felt accompanied.
When I listen to Songs From The Big Chair now, decades later, something of the same quality of experience comes upon me. Not nostalgia exactly, though there is some of that. Something deeper and quieter. The sense that certain things carry a presence that does not diminish with time. That the campfire lit in the inner-wilderness of a confused sixteen-year-old is still burning somewhere, still warm, still casting the same light.
I think about that album when I think about what Life Telling Processing is trying to be for the men who bring their stories into this work.
Not a fix. Not a technique. Not a protocol that resolves the confusion and organizes the interior landscape into something more manageable and more socially presentable.
Something that burns in the inner-wilderness of a man's story and provides enough light and enough warmth that the wilderness becomes bearable. That what has been living in the cold indifference of the external world, the career that does not satisfy, the marriage that has grown quiet, the success that arrived without filling what it was supposed to fill, begins to feel companionable rather than simply heavy.
What that album gave a lonely teenager was the experience of feeling safe and known within, in spite of the cold indifference encountered in the external elements of the life being lived. The world outside had rearranged itself. The divorce was real. The lost school was real. The absent friendships were real. None of that changed when I put on the headphones.
But something inside changed. Something settled. Something that had been scattered and unnamed began to gather itself around the warmth of those melodies and find, temporarily and imperfectly and sufficiently, a place to rest.
That is what I hope Life Telling Processing offers the man who brings his story into this work. Not the resolution of what is difficult in his external life. That is not always available and it is not always the work's to offer. But the experience of being accompanied through it. Of sitting in the warmth of a space where what he carries is received without judgment and without the pressure to become something other than what it is before it has been fully heard.
The inner-wilderness is real. The cold indifference of a life that does not always cooperate with what a man hoped it would be is real.
The campfire is also real.
It is what the work is trying to be. It is what that album was for a teenager who needed it more than he knew.
I still listen to Songs From The Big Chair. Not often. But when I do I am returned, briefly and completely, to something true about what it means to be accompanied through a season you cannot manage alone. To feel the warmth of a presence that does not ask you to be further along than you are. That simply burns in the middle of the wilderness and lets you sit beside it for as long as you need.
That is what I am reaching for in every session, in every conversation, in every careful hour of this work.
A campfire in the inner-wilderness.
You are welcome to come and sit beside it.