Burner Herzog, courtesy Martin Bisi.

For tens of thousands of years before Sigmund Freud and the advent of modern psychology, human beings struggled to maintain their sanity with the help of art and religion. This year Burner Herzog‘s latest album, Random Person, got me through some rough months. Like a good therapist, the new album from NYC-by-way-of Berkeley’s Jasper Leach and company offers up self-reflection, recrimination and release.

David Gill. Original art: Julia Kovaleva.

“All of our deeds, they sing us off to sleep/ ‘Til troubled dreams start us up,” Leach sings over the lonesome jukebox rock and roll of the album’s musical high water mark, “Memo to Persephone,” mapping out our Sisyphean dilemma to lilting pedal steel guitar. Somehow, the power and drama of the musical moment serve as a special reminder that even in the living of our small daily lives, we are wracked with thoughts and feelings on the grandest scale, our own personal soap operas of past regret, thwarted ambitions, convoluted desires, comforting outrage, diffuse indifference, futile empathy, enervating frustration and wordless wonder at the beauty of it all.

It’s nice to hear I’m not the only one.

Random Person was the soundtrack to my inner storms, and like good music in movies, the songs added something to the plot lines of my life. For several weeks, I would listen to the album on my commute to work. I learned to time it so that I could hear the second song, “Sometimes It’s Hard to Break Free,” just as I was sitting in traffic waiting to get on the Bay Bridge. “This is something borrowed, something new/ Just like teacher said to do/ As she hands your chains and the key,” Leach sings at one of the song’s most melodically intense moments.

As a teacher, struggling with increasingly unprepared, seemingly unmotivated college students, I absolutely needed to roll this wonderful idea around in my brain before marching into the classroom, duly fortified. “Dear students,” I could say, “All of your hard work contains the seeds of our liberation in this ceaseless and tidal interplay between history and the present moment.”

You know, the way English teachers do. And when they didn’t listen, I could remember the song’s title and refrain, “Sometimes it’s hard to break free.”

Sometimes it’s hard to break free from the ties with which we are bound, and harder still to free ourselves from the ties with which we bind ourselves. And sadly, we must concede, despite our best efforts, we cannot free others who have yet to find their own key to the restraints.

Burner Herzog, “Random Person.”

But there’s another moment in the song, one of Tom-Petty-esque transcendent simplicity when, over the most basic of backbeats, Leach points to the path of emancipation: “I want to feel the earth beneath my feet/ I want to turn the sounds off from the street/ I want to wake up from this psychic sleep and greet the day.” The moment’s emphatic simplicity provided a much-needed and daily emotional calibration.

“Caught ‘twixt extremes/ We hug the middle/ Thinking we’ve solved life’s cosmic riddle,” Leach sings on Random Person‘s grunge epic, “Metric Halo.”

This year, my kid went away to college, and it was wonderful and painful in nearly equal parts. And what I learned is that peace is not to be found by trying to average the disparate emotions into lukewarm drudgery, but rather by experiencing, and attempting to savor, each in its turn. That’s a lot easier with a good soundtrack.

In my 51 years on the planet, I have learned that some human beings are nearly blank media, or worse, are unheard songs of exquisite beauty but to which we cannot find a way to listen. So I am thankful there are these magic black vinyl discs out there that contain the multitudes of existence, and that evoke in us the divine spark of really being alive, and that provide for us the camaraderie of friendship, and the comfort of feeling understood—which is enough, sometimes.