I am sitting in a bus in Croatia looking out the window, listening to Gregory Alan Isakov’s song, ‘She always takes it black’. This 2 minute 50 second song has been on repeat for the last 10 days. I am sad. Only this song can wring the appropriate heartache out of me. I listen to this song while trying to go to sleep, when sitting on the harbour looking out at sea. I am lost. I have just ended a 6 year relationship and fallen head first into another star crossed love. There was excitement of all this possibility but in some corner of my heart I knew that this was not it.

Gregory Alan Isakov was the background music to the realisation that being and staying in love required a set of special circumstances that you do not control. With the right person, everything is just right, with the wrong person, no jumping of hoops will do. This song will bottle that feeling up. It will time stamp my life. Every time I listen to this song, I am back at a window in a bus going through Croatia

There have been many songs that have held onto me till an emotion has passed or is adequately buried. While words play a role, sometimes it is what the sound allows me to access in myself. Meute’s performance of ‘You and me’ was the beginning of a new relationship. The relationship held the promise of being everything this song was. It was fun, flirty and endlessly energising. I listened to this song as this boy convinced me that there was no one as smart, as beautiful or as fun as me. And every girl needs that once from someone. Now when I need that feeling, I listen to this song again.

Billy Joel’s ‘Vienna’ is my song as I drive to the gym in the morning (I listen to Gretta Ray’s version). Last few years, two things have happened, I have become increasingly worried that I am not as ambitious as I thought I was and I have become increasingly aware of my mortality. ‘Vienna’ is my daily reminder, a reassurance that it is okay, it is okay to set your own pace to your life. There are no set rules for anything and the ones who tell you there are, are colouring your ambition with their own. I like to believe, ‘Vienna waits for you’.

I have no connection with music beyond being a listener, an audience. I don’t know how to play it. I am basic. I listen to popular music. I like the lyrics. But an Indian classical instrumental song called ‘New Morning’ by an Indian sarod artist called Prattyush Banerjee is the first song I will steal from my husband’s playlist. We will listen to it as friends, then as partners. Every time it plays, I am a little more hopeful, more grateful, filled with more grace and faith. Much like what a good relationship can do to you.