CW: Suicide, depression

Have you ever woken up and wondered where you are and why you’re naked?

You are now listening to Headache.

“You would like this.” He listens to music loud enough that the whole car shakes with the boom of the percussion. A group of three men sitting at a patio table turn to look at us as we sit parked in a concrete structure off Lloyd Street. Before stepping on the gas, he lets the voice from the rest of the album come in.

I used to take my breakfast off of a mirror.

Now I just walk around and stare at people in the park.

I have no idea what the voice is saying. I add the entire album to my playlist. Maybe I’ll think more about the lyrics later. Maybe it’s not that deep.

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In May 2023, electronic artist Vegyn collaborated with poet Francis Hornsby Clark under the name Headache to release the EP The Head Hurts But the Heart Knows the Truth. While Vegyn has received attention for his production work with artists like Frank Ocean, JPEGMafia, Dean Blunt, and Travis Scott, his solo work speaks for itself. At age 32, Vegyn is among the most prominent and influential artists in electronic music. The voice who speaks throughout the EP belongs to neither Vegyn nor Clark—instead, AI performs Clark’s lyrics over Vegyn’s music. In an interview with The Quietus, Vegyn says, “People get concerned about AI, but people hated drum machines when they first came out. It’s still about the human experience, somebody actually playing a thing.” In the same way that Vegyn plays with layers of drum beats and dreamy highway synths, Clark plays with words and characters.

I’ve always been partial to awful main characters, so Headache’s idea to make an album about the most unlikeable man in the world struck a chord. The voice is a self-obsessed and self-righteous middle-class white man who develops an obsession with the worst woman in the world. He makes excuses for his poor choices and offers far more empathy to himself than to anyone else. Behind his words, the music emphasizes the disconnectedness of his internal and external experiences. The percussion feels grounding, as if you can feel the beat vibrate from the floor to your knees, but the melody floats far above it, blinking and glittering as if in midair. In lyrics and sounds, there’s a constant push-and-pull between the real world—sharp, rigid hi-hats and snares—and the voice’s inner world— smooth, windchime-like, head-in-the-clouds electronic refrains.

Headache’s voice continually fails to confront his problems head-on. He embodies the anti-self help-book, superficial antiestablishmentarian who shifts blame to a vaguely defined ‘other’ rather than finding a foothold on life—exactly the type to proclaim that you don’t owe anyone anything, your mental health is out of your hands, you aren’t at fault, you aren’t to blame, you’re doing everything right, and no one is mad at you. In “The Thing with the Rabbit,” the second track on the EP, he says, “I shouldn't be responsible for what I say / Someone else should be responsible for what I say.” He lives in a world that revolves around him, yelling his woes into the microphone as if expecting others, or even the listener, to help him. In “The Beginning of the End,” he says, “Do you think I'm normal? / Say I'm normal. / Please, for fuck's sake, please say I'm normal.” He lives entirely in his own mind, demanding validation from the listener while unable to detach himself from the web he’s spun. But within and between the voice’s self-pitying monologues, there are hints of relatability.

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I get stuck in the same loop of self-indulgent suffering. I wake up at 5 a.m. and stay in bed until noon. I lay by my phone and wait for someone to ask to come over. I listen to Headache.

And I just wish stuff would stop happening so fast

I just want to catch my breath and feel that I exist in a moment

Within a moment

Inside this time right now

I let myself stay there. I don’t wiggle my toes. I don’t open the journal whose spine sits an inch in front of my nose. I don’t click the pen that grazes my thumb every time my heart beats. I don’t turn off the music. My pain doesn’t feel like it’s entirely mine: I didn’t do anything to give myself this pit in my stomach. It isn’t my fault, so it can’t be my responsibility. No one is going to save me. I refuse to save myself.

The AI voice is just human enough to sound familiar, and Clark’s writing isn’t a 1:1 representation of a real person’s lived experience—at least certainly not that of Vegyn or Clark—but it has real implications. The narrative doesn’t really belong to anyone, and the events seem unbelievable at times, making it easier to relate to. It isn’t an album about a breakup that’s just a bit too different from your own. It’s about sleeping on the street, not paying for dinner at a restaurant, mailing suicide notes to news media conglomerates, hearing voices. It’s that partial suspension of disbelief—the moment when you know you’ve felt that way before—that brings you into his world.

Headache’s voice lives so deeply inside his own mind that he exists a step behind his body. He loses his grip on reality, reciting incantations that toe the line between nonsense and poetry: 

The cow is for land and the horse is for water

But can you really feel the sound of two hundred people eating?

I was in Ancient Egypt with the rabbit

I saw the whole thing

I exist like cocaine

The voice explains the meaning of his lyrics on “The Pavement is my Pillow Talk,” saying “It’s deep / But it’s not that deep.” There is a deeper meaning to the words that the voice says, but it’s not that deep. The real meaning is in his free-associative lament.

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I walk home from the library with a friend. By the time we get to North Campus, I’m not absorbing my surroundings. I don’t know how I got from A to B. All I can say is, “I’m fourteen years old, and I never learned how to walk. I’m made of sticks and glass and I’m stuck together by mud from a lake in Massachusetts. I don’t know what lake.”

“Are you okay?” she asks me. Tears are falling off my cheeks and soaking into the fibers of my scarf.

“It’s 1927 and the Great Depression is coming and no one will listen to me because I won’t tell them what the Great Depression is. And I don’t believe in the Dust Bowl because I only learned about it last year and if it actually happened then I would’ve learned about it earlier.”

We aren’t walking anymore.

“I’m eleven years old.”

She shrugs and swings her arms outward, hands still shoved in her pockets. “I’m four!” 

I smile, stop crying, hug her goodnight, and walk into my dorm. I go to bed with the feeling that something within me will never go to rest when I want it to.

Headache perfectly captures how it feels to be unwell—every thought you have is disconnected, but they all feel relevant. Your mind moves too fast to keep track of any singular thought, and you exist in an internal haze of your own creation. The man shaking your shoulders is 20 feet away. The alarm is going off and begging you to pick yourself up, but there’s ease and comfort in remaining unwell. Choosing to heal takes courage and effort. Stay in bed. Feel your emotions deeply, but don’t engage with them. Your pain isn’t just the truth of how you feel, but it’s the right thing to feel.

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The voice finally escapes his self-pitying cycle through what Vegyn refers to as “happy melancholy,” a common theme in his solo work. There’s a moment in the EP when something switches. The voice finally engages with the life in front of him and breaks out of his haze.

My head hurts but I know the truth

I know that love is the only thought

And pain is the only feeling

And I'm ready to dance

I don't know what happened to me

But I don't really care anymore

There’s a lot that’s out of your hands. You can’t control how people treat you or what happens to you. You can’t make others heal you. You have to let yourself accept it. Find your own love, heal your own suffering, accept your own grief. Find a foothold, get a grip.