When my relationship fell apart at the height of the pandemic, I suddenly couldn’t listen to music. The sound of the drums and vocals felt like I was staring straight into the sun. Even my favorite songs seemed to me like erupting noise. In trial therapy sessions I was diagnosed with a depressive episode. A typical symptom is that things that used to bring you joy suddenly no longer mean anything. The fact that music suddenly couldn’t touch me anymore felt like I had lost myself. I would often lie for hours in complete silence in my bedroom, hands clasped over my heart like an embalmed mummy. Over time, however, I realized that there were soft sounds that at least didn’t irritate me. Through anti-anxiety playlists on Spotify, I discovered artists like Aeoliah, Steven Halpern, Suzanne Doucet, and Liquid Mind that the streaming service had classified as “New Age.” Many tracks were little more than permeable veils. They contained none of the euphoric energy I used to seek in music. Even before my depression, I used to listen to Brian Eno when I couldn’t sleep. But this music went one step further. The sweetish synth pads were more like acoustic blankets than “acoustic furniture”. The covers featured angels, or dolphins, or dolphins with angel wings, floating off into rainbow-colored universes. The titles were “Intergalactic Lullaby” or “Reiki Hands Of Light”. In the past, I wouldn’t have given 30 seconds to such an agglomeration of clichés. Now I let it sprinkle me for hours.
New Age is probably the last taboo for a music nerd like me. No other genre is so discredited because of its esoteric sound aesthetic. Brian Eno once said that the problem with New Age is that there is no longer a trace of evil in it. Lounge music for Himmelspforen.
“If you want to make music that relaxes people, you call it ambient. If you want to sell dirt to people with no taste, you call it New Age,” says American music curator and New Age expert Douglas McGowan, describing the prevailing consensus on New Age. And yet I couldn’t deny that this music was doing something to me. She soothed me. She gave me hope: that one day the pain would subside. That I hadn’t completely lost the music. Was it because of my longing for inner peace that I was suddenly open to musical sedation and spiritual promises?
I began exploring enlightening literature at random, from Helena Blavatsky to Eckart Tolle. I found many promises: The dissolution of the ego. A life in the light. The omnipresence of the divine. The realization that only the here and now exists and that death is an illusion. I was particularly captivated by the prospect that my pain could be a gateway to awakening. The American Pema Chödrön, who became a Buddhist nun after a traumatic breakup, wrote a whole book about it. I had discovered the title while self-medicating Googling: “When everything collapses”.
But in the end all teachings remained just words. It was the immediacy of New Age music that gave me a glimpse that there might be a deeper truth behind them. What was music anyway? As a music journalist, I’ve been writing about musicians and musical trends for years without even touching on this question. Were New Age musicians right when they saw music as a spiritual tool? Did they have knowledge with which they were actually able to heal people – to heal me?
How Suzanne Doucet Became the Gatekeeper of the New Age Genre
Still having no idea who to sell an article about this stigmatized genre to, I contacted California-based New Age musician Suzanne Doucet. I was immediately impressed by her story. In the 1960s she was a German teenage superstar. Staged as a youngster with a bobbed haircut, she landed number one hits like the Ronettes cover “Sei mein Baby”. She presented music and children’s programs alongside showbiz greats such as Hans Clarin and introduced a newcomer named David Bowie to the German-speaking audience. Everyone in Germany, Austria and Switzerland who had a TV set knew her face. At the end of the 1970s, the native of Tübingen, who meanwhile sang her own chansons, decided to emigrate to the USA and devote herself entirely to this instrumental music, for which the term New Age was just beginning to establish itself. In LA, in the hip Melrose district, she opened the world’s first record store specializing exclusively in New Age, with customers including celebrities such as Prince and Sylvester Stallone. Doucet became one of the genre’s most important gatekeepers. She networked and released artists on her Isis label and was commissioned by Hollywood to create a New Age category for the Grammys. What did she see in this music that made her give up her career in Germany? After a short email exchange, we arrange to meet up for a chat on Zoom.
“I had traveled half the world at the time. It was time for me to step inside,” Doucet tells me of her home in the Hollywood Hills. She began her spiritual path as a child. Her father, Friedrich-Wilhelm Doucet, was a student of Carl Gustav Jung and had written numerous books on dream interpretation and parapsychology. “He was a free spirit. We talked a lot about these things.”
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