Milo Meskens’ new album ‘All the things I couldn’t tell my therapist’ is an emotional journey from darkness to light

Imagine a cold autumn rainy day indoor, wrapped up in a blanket with a warm cup of tea in hand, that bittersweet mix of melancholy and coziness, flavored with honest emotions and relatable lyrics that manage to speak to your heart. That’s what Milo Meskens’ music feels to me.

It was last year when I first heard of Milo Meskens. I was at the end of my Erasmus semester in Ghent, and my friends and I took a day trip to Leuven for Het Groot Verlof, the yearly summer music festival. Ironically, I missed his performance 'cause I was queuing for food—sorry, priorities—so I arrived late, but my friends talked so well about him that I started to follow him on Spotify, and well, I slowly became a fan. As it often happens with good music, it was a slow-burn for me. When I peeked through his albums—two, at that time—I first found resonance with Quarter Life Crisis. What I liked was the combination of a delicate blues-pop style with intimate lyrics that were perfectly resonating with me. I'm only one year younger than him and man, that quarter life crisis I could definitely feel it, and I still do. I've been listening to his music and following him ever since, and he just dropped a new album I think it's worth to talk about.

All The Things I Couldn't Tell My Therapist is a journey from darkness to light. As Meskens himself shared, the album stemmed from a dark place, a moment in life when everything felt hopeless and feelings couldn’t come out if not through music. Released not coincidentally on October 10, World Mental Health Day, this record is something real and intimate that takes courage to share with the public. To steal the words of Zoe Kravitz in the High Fidelity’s latest screen adaptation, “making a playlist is a delicate art", and I think ‘All the things I couldn’t tell my therapist’ is the perfect balance of all this.

Album breakdown

12 tracks that could be dissected into 5-1-5, with two main sections and a shift after the core. An album is a story, and finding the right sequence of tracks to tell it properly can become almost as important as writing the right songs. The first half starts off with Immortal, the dark place, as if we were transported to a Dante's dark forest-like scenario at the beginning of his journey through hell. Milo is trying to say that he’s struggling, but he wants to survive. With Stranger, the second track echoing Pink Floyd's Brain Damage’s lyrics—There’s someone in my head but it’s not me—and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s themes, the conflict between the two versions of himself is getting real. I’ve been living with a stranger in my head, I’m becoming a stranger to my own bed. I’ve been living with a killer in my mind, he’s telling me to kill myself sometimes. But Milo doesn’t want to die, as the first lines of the third song recite.

If I Don’t Want To Live, Do I Die? is the first burst of explosion after a soft melancholic start, and the first piece where the author starts to ask himself questions and never stops, on to Into The Water—does somebody out there need me?—and the outburst of anger of Friends?!, the rockiest song on the album, rich in guitar solos in which the pent-up anger finally comes to the surface and Meskens gets a few pebbles off his shoe. Hopeless is the core of the record, and it reminded me of When I Feel This Way from his previous album. Loneliness, people leaving, craving for connection and human touch, and lots of questions again. Am I hopeless or just hopelessly holding onto something, to all the wrong things?

After ‘Hopeless’ there’s a clear recovery, as if the lowest point had been reached and there was no alternative but to rise back to the surface. The half of himself fighting his demons begins to rise up and hold on to the good things in his life, like his friend Steven. Curious how a song actually full of hope and esteem for a friendship comes immediately after ‘Hopeless’. It’s like Steven represented the first glimmer of hope itself. The bittersweet melancholy hits again with Ain’t It A Shame?, which is about being afraid that the best days are already gone, about youth slipping away too fast, kind of a too late in hindsight carpe diem reminder for not having realized the best when he was living it.

The ninth track Nothing More (To Give Away) talks about making peace with his inner child, the kid inside the mirror, and basically with himself. A young shy Milo trying to mask his sadness between the school desks, a past version to look after and not to disown, because all that I am is all that I have. It’s another important step of growth and forgiveness, as he said he’s been learning to lose the wrong people for all the right reasons, maybe like Mister Millions, a friend who turned his back. Its lively rhythm makes it however feel like although the loss is still bitter and there’s still hope to reconnect, Milo seems to accept that things might not always go as expected, and every friend gives you something to lose, echoing the theme of Something To Lose from his previous record. The last two tracks are a breath of fresh air, the much sought-after hope that finally takes shape, first in the guise of a new love made of quirky small differences in When She’s Around, and then with an ode to having made it, a shoutout to himself and to the people who stayed around, and a cry of encouragement for whoever might be going down the same rabbit hole. It is possible to find a way out, he seems to say, with the right people and the right help. This Is The Year I almost died, this is the year that I’m surviving.

The more I listen to this album , the more I realize that hope was always present somewhere down there from the very beginning, even when he didn’t see it, and that he was trying to hold on tight to life. All those questions were a form of hope, they could guide him towards the right direction, and help shed light in the darkest of rooms. Music helped him untie the tight knots he was keeping inside. All The Things I Couldn’t Tell My Therapist is a personal journey to go face one's demons to hell and back, a fight with oneself and a powerful cry for victory. Maybe it ain’t a shame after all, when you start thinking that some of your best days are always yet to come.

Listen to the full album here

I strongly encourage listening to this record, along with Milo Meskens’ previous works. ‘The Flemish Ed Sheeran’, I heard someone say. He’s definitely one to keep an eye on, and in the meantime, press play.