The burnout playlist
How songs by Bob Dylan, Kendrick Lamar & others contributed to "The End of Burnout." Plus: Audiobook giveaway!
I was the guest on this week’s episode of The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. If that conversation was how you found out about me, my book, and this newsletter, then welcome! The conversation was great fun, and it was an honor to get to reach such a large audience. The podcast appeared on the same day as Laurie’s interview with the New York Times Magazine, wherein she explains how she is stepping back from some of her responsibilities at Yale in hopes of avoiding burnout.
The End of Burnout recently received positive reviews in The Bulwark and Times Literary Supplement. In fact, I much appreciated the thoughtful engagement with the book in Mike St. Thomas’s Bulwark review. In addition, the book was a focus of Russell Moore’ Christianity Today column, and was discussed in a post on The Art of Manliness. (While I applaud the AOM post’s engagement with the problem of acedia, I think it misses the mark concerning burnout.)
The book continues to get international attention. I appeared on Radio New Zealand this week, the Swedish magazine Dagens Arena published an interview with me, and I was on the Latin American news channel NTN24, talking about the book.
If you like the book, please rate and review it! I’m very grateful to those who have.
In fact, to encourage you to rate the book and pass along this newsletter, let’s do a giveaway of the audio edition.
Respond to this message by March 2, saying that you either left a rating or review of the book on Amazon or forwarded this newsletter to someone. This will be on the honor system; no documentation needed. (But please only rate or review if you have read at least some of the book!)
Then I will randomly select five of the people who’ve responded, and they will receive a code to get a free download of the Audible edition of the book.
And (I know, these are a lot of announcements) I’ll be on a panel for the Dallas Literary Festival on Sunday, March 20 at 9:00 am at the African American Museum of Dallas in Fair Park. For more info and to register, visit here. (The event is free, and there are many other great panels and readings at the festival!)
When I was reading through the manuscript for The End of Burnout sometime last year, I was struck by the place of music and music videos in it. There aren’t a lot of mentions of music in the book, but the ones that are there come at crucial moments.
Here are six songs that are either mentioned in the book or closely connected to my writing of it.
Neil Young, “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)”
This song is not mentioned in the book, but it touches on the main theme. Everybody knows it’s better to burn out than to fade away. What this book presupposes is, maybe it isn’t?
The classic line about burnout was in Kurt Cobain’s suicide note. I think Cobain tragically misunderstood what Young was saying in it. Young’s point wasn’t to go out in a blaze of glory, to die before you get old, but, as Jason Tebbe contends in a podcast about the song, to keep burning, to keep rocking, even as you get old. In that respect, Neil offers a different sense of burning out than I’m using in the book.
Neil Young was about my age in this fantastic concert video performance of the harder-edged companion track, “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black).” He was considered a dinosaur even then. But look at him in the video. Look at him now. His whole career has been about burning on and on, seeing how much fuel is in the tank.
Peter Gabriel, “Don’t Give Up”
I mention “Don’t Give Up” in the first sentence of the book. The song is about men put out of work in deindustrializing, Thatcherite England. The economic changes that were occurring in the 1970s and 80s are part of the story of burnout, but I returned to that song and its video again and again during the depths of my burnout because of the hopelessness that Gabriel expresses and the consolation Bush offers. Gabriel’s image of the burned-out landscape matched how I felt. But no matter how many times I watched this video, I couldn’t make myself believe what Bush was saying. (This surprises even me, as I love Kate Bush.)
If you haven’t seen this video, you need to watch it. The singers embrace for six minutes straight; it’s an earnest expression of human compassion that is almost embarrassing to watch.
Kendrick Lamar, “Alright”
As I discuss in the book’s introduction, I showed the video for this song at the start of a meeting of my Social Ethics class during what turned out to be my final semester of college teaching. (The video was in the lesson plan I wrote about in my last newsletter.) The video is emotionally very intense and does not flinch from violence, but it also speaks profoundly to people’s irreducible dignity in the face of social injustice. The refrain, “We gon’ be alright” became a protest chant. I thought the students would want to talk about these complex themes, expressed in the idiom of their generation.
Nope. They had nothing to say. I never felt more stupid than I did then, trying to get 20-year-olds to have an opinion about a music video. As it happened, this was the day my department chair chose to visit my class, so I felt stupid in front of a colleague.
This moment isn’t what caused my burnout — that had been a long time in the works — but it was when I knew my career was over, that I could no longer do what I had set out to do.
Bob Dylan, “Shelter from the Storm”
This song, recorded in 1974, was crucial to the historical argument I make in chapter two, about burnout’s appearance in the mid-1970s. I wasn’t even planning on making a lengthy historical argument until I heard, among the typically Dylanesque rambling, “I was burned out from exhaustion.” Something clicked. Dylan was singing about burnout right when the two psychologists who independently theorized the condition, Herbert Freudenberger and Christina Maslach, were publishing their first papers. Then I heard another long, shaggy song by an iconic songwriter from the same era…
Neil Young, “Ambulance Blues”
“All along the Navajo Trail / Burnouts stub their toes on garbage pails” is the key lyric. Young released his On the Beach album in mid-1974, a few months before Dylan recorded “Shelter from the Storm” for Blood on the Tracks.
I started thinking that the psychologists and the musicians were all picking up on the same thing at the same time, some signal in the culture. That made me want to focus more on the fascinating story of Freudenberger’s and Maslach’s independent, simultaneous “discovery” of burnout and the economic changes going on in the U.S. during the 1970s. Burnout was a response to very specific historical conditions. Almost fifty years later, we still haven’t gotten free of them.
The War on Drugs, “Burning”
I wrote most of the book while listening to The War on Drugs’s 2014 album, Lost in the Dream. It was a perfect soundtrack. The album is sixty minutes long and maintains a fairly consistent mellow mood. The vocals are not prominent in the way they are with Dylan, for instance, so they aren’t a distraction.
I’ve heard from other writers who listened to this album over and over while writing; someone once suggested to me that there have been more books than babies produced by people listening to it. (This seems plausible.)
“Burning” provides a thematic lift; it’s more exuberant than the songs that go before it. Until writing this note, I wasn’t too clear on what the lyrics were, but as I have now discovered, they’re about burning and being a light for those who are in darkness.
Burnout is a bad feeling, but it doesn’t have to be the end. It wasn’t for me. I hope that through this book, my own burnout can light the way beyond it for others.1
In the book I also mention Slowdive, the English shoegaze band that was playing on a Benedictine monk’s computer while I interviewed him for chapter seven. But I don’t really know their music. In any case, here’s their song, “Sugar for the Pill.” Maybe they need to become the soundtrack for my next book.