Comforting Sounds

There’s this thing I do that I never really talk about. An obsessive ritual. Every time there’s a tectonic shift approaching in my life, whether I see it coming or just feel it in my gut, I start listening to Mew’s Comforting Sounds on repeat. I don’t mean casually. Not just once or twice. I mean looped on repeat, until it embeds itself into the air around me.

It’s never planned. I don’t think, “Ah yes, time to cue up the dramatic soundtrack.” It just… happens. And by the time I notice it, I’m already eyeballs deep in it, the track playing over and over as I stare out of windows, sit on floors, pack boxes, write endings, begin again.

For me, Comforting Sounds isn’t just a song. It’s an omen. A companion. A metronome of transformation. Something in it seems to just * know* before I do, that life is about to bend into something unrecognizable. And somehow, it helps me brace for it.

It starts soft. Hesistant. Like the beginning of a thought you haven’t fully allowed yourself to have. Then it slowly grows, layers unfolding, tension building, not in a harsh way, but with this tender insistence that "yes, something is shifting. That the quiet can’t last forever.

And then comes the swell.

That long, expansive ending. No words. Just a haunting, looping melody that holds you inside it. It doesn’t resolve, not really. It just fades. Like something you loved and had to let go of. Like the version of yourself that got you this far but won’t follow you into what’s next.

Every time I’ve had to make a leap, be it career, country, love, identity, it’s been there. Whispering, and then wailing. Letting me mourn before I even know what I’m mourning.

I don’t know if this is strange. I don’t know if other people have songs that seem to arrive in their lives like messengers, or premonitions. A sort of harbinger of change. But this one finds me every time the ground starts to shift.

And I let it.
Because maybe the song knows before I do.
Maybe it always has.