Look what I did, I made a mess
Blood on my hands is sentimental
Could be that I was just depressed
It’s never going to end, no…”
—From “Blow Me” by The Used
For Bert McCracken—singer and vocalist of The Used—music and emotion are one and the same. In fact, when asked whether he considered The Used to be an “emo” band, Bert McCracken answered the question with a question:
“Emo was just such a strange thing, because what is music without emotion?”
His point is well taken. Music makes us feel—period. Many of us discover, experience, explore, and express our emotions through music. Who among us does not have artists, albums, or even just songs that connect to our experience—the “soundtrack” of our lives?
As a young kid growing up in Utah, McCracken knew right away that music resonated with him on a deep emotional level. “I grew up on ’80s pop. I grabbed that kind of emotive connection from… Janet and Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston. Great pop love songs,” McCracken told me. “I wanted to get lost in the emotion of the artist. I wanted to be inside their love story and their breakup.
“I could already feel it before I understood it.”
Music has a particular power when it allows us—or even entices us—to experience emotions that are considered taboo, because certain emotions are forbidden by others or too scary for us to acknowledge ourselves. As part of a conservative Mormon household, McCracken felt confined by his family’s religious ideology.
“The unknown… religions are terrified about people having their own thoughts and having their own pathways of enlightenment,” McCracken told me. “Because there’s a certain specific story—and outside of that story, nothing else is real. There’s one truth… so any kind of deflection from that path is going to be a bad thing.”
One of the most taboo artists in McCracken’s house was Nirvana. Not only did Nirvana’s album Incesticide boldly address forbidden topics but also their unplugged version of The Vaseline’s “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me for a Sunbeam“—a take on the religious standard “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam“—appeared to be intentional sacrilege.
“My parents are very religious, so rock and roll was out of the question with a few exceptions… it was all kind of taboo. Nirvana’s Incesticide… I bought that record six separate times. My mother kept finding it and kept throwing it away. I don’t know if it was necessarily the emotion of it—it was just the fear of the unknown. And it was just the abandon and the lack of respect for things that other people consider sacred. I remember my mom being like, ‘Do you know what incest is?’ And my being like, ‘Yeah, we learned that early on in school.’ Incesticide is death by incest,” McCracken recalled. “Growing up—’Sunbeam’ was a prominent song. So ‘Jesus Don’t Want Me for a Sunbeam’ was Devil’s music. There was nothing more rebellious than that.”
“Yeah, this is not stuff for your normal Christian, conservative family.”
As McCracken became an artist himself, he saw music becoming the primary vehicle for not just experiencing his emotions, but now expressing his emotions. And whereas he felt confined in what he could listen to at home, he particularly valued exploring painful topics in his own music.
“Music is church, therapy, and philosophy all wrapped up into one. It’s my place to contemplate my place in the world, and the world in general,” he described. “Healing is not as enjoyable as not having a cut. But what you gain from it—the lessons you learn, all of those things… I think humans always shine when they’re ripped from their comfort zone.”
McCracken felt particularly drawn to writing about despair. “A lot of feelings you have in your life—rejection when you’re a kid—can be piled up into one general despair… I think it’s loss, fear, sadness, and sometimes anguish over sadness,” he said. “‘I fell in love deeply’—those are always great songs. ‘I lost that great love’—that’s an even better song. The heartbroken moments, the tough moments in life where you’ve just fallen off, you’ve just smashed your face—it’s really easy to forget that those are the moments that make us who we are. It’s how we get back up that defines us as people.”
Much of McCracken’s own despair and heartbreak involved his alcohol dependence. Paradoxically, just as McCracken had managed to break free from the external limitations put on his emotional experience, he was soon suppressing his own emotions through drinking. “Alcohol is an amazing drug, and it works really well. And it can immediately take you out of any feeling,” he said. “But when you come down—when you crash down—it makes things 10 times what they seemed or were before.”
As McCracken recovered and became sober, he saw the connection between alcohol and smothering his feelings and reaffirmed the importance of open emotional experience and expression in his life and music. “Addicts have a huge want and need to control things. And once you realize your pathway out of any true moment of feeling—it’s really easy to think you can control everything in your life,” McCracken explained. “Understanding that the only thing I truly can control is how I react, how I act and how I react to things has been huge for me. Learning that and accepting that every day keeps me humble, I think.
“Humble enough to not drink.”
McCracken discussed how being newly sober influenced his songwriting on The Used’s album The Canyon. “Maybe that’s why The Canyon felt so brutal to me—it was the first time in 15 years that I made music without a crutch… I’m a lot better at it when I have a sober mind,” he described. “I tried to make a very specific record about a very specific event—the death of one of my closest friends. And I found it a lot harder—a lot more painful to be in that moment. Not only was there more discomfort doing it that way, but also the end result is just as painful. I think memories live inside songs. I think it’s such a pathway to the senses. Just like smell and taste can make you travel through time back to a moment, I think songs have the same potency.
“The exposure to the true feelings on this record is astounding.”
McCracken feels that he’s continuing to explore emotionally honest and difficult topics with The Used’s 2020 album Heartwork. And he’s taking on old emotional taboos from his childhood.
“It’s about being a little kid and stuck in a basement, so to speak. Our idea was that this man—The Used personified—was this young man kept in a box, this cold dark room—denied the ability to learn to speak,” McCracken said. “It’s a story about people putting the language of God to the test by keeping children removed from society for their entire lives. I think it’s a cool metaphor for a reflection on modern technology and religion and lemming-like behavior. And people who dare to take a step outside of that tradition have always paved new ways.
“Call it emo if you like. It doesn’t matter.”
