High Fidelity - music and misery

And then there's "Love Hurts" and "When Love Breaks Down" and "How Can You Mend A Broken Heart" and "The Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness" and "She's Gone" and "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" and... some of these songs I have listened to around once a week, on average (three hundred times in the first month, every now and again thereafter), since I was sixteen or nineteen or twenty-one. How can that not leave you bruised somewhere? How can that not turn you into the sort of person liable to break into little bits when your first love goes all wrong? What came first, the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?

Nick Hornby