Take our Depression Test

Find a therapist to heal from grief

On Trust Me's new album, Why I Like Dead Guys, Lynn Breedlove conjures dead people. Let me explain.

The concept album is a response to the brutal murder of Breedlove’s father and stepmother at the hands of his stepbrother. The frame—the first song and the last—of the album is about the murders and their aftermath. But this is not a true crime record. The rest of its songs are elegies that tell vivid stories about people who have died throughout Breedlove's life.

Breedlove, Tribe 8 veteran and queer-punk legend, narrates the resurrection of his characters with an inviting baritone and emotional specificity: A girlfriend who returned to her parents' home when AIDS was a death sentence; a grandmother who took him in when he was strung out on meth; boys from childhood he admired or wanted to become; drug buddies; his mom; a beloved family dog. The tragedy becomes the background for a song cycle focused on the emotional intricacy of relationships. Anger and resentment are part of the story, but so are love, admiration, and wily humor.

The album opens with Breedlove's "love letter to a brother from another mother." On "Incompetent," he addresses his brother directly: "I'd visit you in jail, but I'm busy trying to remember how my dad sounded when I'd ask him to whistle while we counted shooting stars." His anger is magnanimous, his humor cutting, his reflection moving. The song borrows the melody of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Stardust”—most famously performed by Nat King Cole—a tune Breedlove’s father would hum while they hiked. The reference is apt. Carmichael’s love song unites the domestic with the cosmic, the place where Breedlove’s characters seem to live.

A psychoanalyst might describe Breedlove's characters as objects. In 1952, Scottish psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn made a claim that revolutionized his field: "psychology may be said to resolve itself into a study of the relationships of the individual to his objects." The idea is that our psychologies are not inherent in our brains, but made through our relationships. The original object is usually a mother or caregiver—somebody an infant cannot live without, quite literally. The infant internalizes the object. The dynamic between infant and caregiver then expresses itself through a lifetime of relationships. Therapy, therefore, becomes about creating possibilities for new dynamics in those relationships. Art, this album suggests, can accomplish something........

© Psychology Today