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Life's Pleasures Quote by Ville Valo

"Music's always been really cathartic. It's the best drug for me to get away from the everyday pressures just for a second via a good song"

About this Quote

Valo frames music less as art-for-art’s-sake and more as a survival tactic: a controlled escape hatch. Calling it “cathartic” puts him in a lineage of rock frontmen who treat songs as confessionals, but the phrasing is pointedly pragmatic. He’s not romanticizing inspiration; he’s talking about pressure relief, like cracking a valve before the system bursts. That choice matters because it flips the usual mythology of the tortured artist. The torment isn’t the engine of the work; the work is the treatment plan.

“The best drug” is the hinge in the sentence. It’s a loaded metaphor coming from a musician whose scene and era have been saturated with addiction narratives, moral panic, and the glamor-and-ruin cycle of fame. By using drug language while keeping it clean (“for me,” “get away,” “just for a second”), he acknowledges the appetite for numbness without turning it into bravado. The subtext is harm reduction: you still need something to take the edge off, but music is the option that doesn’t collect interest the way chemicals do.

The escape is also deliberately brief. “Just for a second” refuses the fantasy that a song fixes your life; it simply interrupts the grind. That’s an unusually honest promise in an attention economy built on total immersion. Valo’s intent isn’t to elevate music into a cure-all but to defend it as a small, repeatable act of self-regulation: a three-minute refuge you can return to, again and again, without losing yourself.

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TopicMusic
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Valo, Ville. (2026, January 15). Music's always been really cathartic. It's the best drug for me to get away from the everyday pressures just for a second via a good song. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/musics-always-been-really-cathartic-its-the-best-168656/

Chicago Style
Valo, Ville. "Music's always been really cathartic. It's the best drug for me to get away from the everyday pressures just for a second via a good song." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/musics-always-been-really-cathartic-its-the-best-168656/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Music's always been really cathartic. It's the best drug for me to get away from the everyday pressures just for a second via a good song." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/musics-always-been-really-cathartic-its-the-best-168656/. Accessed 21 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

Ville Valo

Ville Valo (born November 22, 1976) is a Musician from Finland.

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