madeira is 740 square kilometers of volcanic rock in the atlantic. the highest point is 1862 meters. the lowest is the ocean. there is very little in between.
i walked 160 kilometers of it. ribeira de janela to machico, roughly west to east, over about a week. 6200 meters of elevation gain. alone.
this is not about the hike. or — it is, but only because the hike is where i accidentally ran a controlled experiment on what music does to a human brain when that brain is exhausted, isolated, and stripped of every distraction it normally hides behind.
the first three days were silent.
i camped the first night at a closed campsite in ribeira de janela. set off through fanal the next morning, through the fog forest where the ancient laurel trees look like something out of a miyazaki film, up to bica da cana. by the second day i’d already scrapped half my plan — skipped day two entirely, cut day three in half.
the adjustment happened naturally. i ended up on PR1.3, a trail that was officially closed. nobody on it. not a person for hours. i wildcamped up there, which you’re not supposed to do, on terrain that felt lunar — exposed ridgelines, clouds below me, the kind of views that make you feel small in a way that isn’t metaphorical.
that night i cried. not from exhaustion. from the surreality of it. the fact that i was there, fully alone, nobody within shouting distance, nobody expecting me anywhere, nobody sharing this with me. and i was happy. genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy. the kind of happy you forget exists when every day has a schedule and every moment has a notification.
it was the highlight of the trip. i hadn’t played a single song yet.
then i put the dadrock playlist on.
day four. i’d come down through curral das freiras — the valley the nuns fled to when pirates raided funchal — and spent a night at the eira do serrado hotel. had a spa day. a reset. and when i started the climb up to pico do areeiro the next morning, i hit shuffle.
iron man. smoke on the water. dream on.
it is difficult to explain what happened next without sounding like i’m exaggerating. i am not exaggerating.
pico do areeiro is 1818 meters. the trail up is relentless. switchbacks on volcanic rock, tourists milling around at the top with selfie sticks, but you’re coming from below, from hours of climbing, carrying everything you own on your back. and somewhere around the 1600-meter mark, when my legs were screaming and my lungs were doing that thing where every breath feels like it’s only reaching the top third, dream on by aerosmith started playing.
the voice cracking on “dream on, dream on, dream on” right as a lookout opened up and the entire island dropped away beneath me.
i cried again. standing there, sweating, breathing hard, crying, with classic rock in my ears and the atlantic ocean in every direction. if you’d watched me you would’ve thought something was wrong. nothing was wrong. everything was exactly right.
here’s the thing nobody talks about.
music doesn’t just accompany your mood. it creates it. your brain reads the emotional character of a song and mirrors it. tempo, key, the energy in the vocals — your nervous system treats all of it as emotional instruction. slow and minor and heavy? your brain produces sadness. fast and loud and confident? your brain produces that instead.
this isn’t subtle. put on radiohead and your whole body slows down. put on sultans of swing and it wakes up. the music isn’t matching how you feel. it’s telling you how to feel, and your brain listens.
i don’t listen to radiohead. i don’t see the point. you have one life and a finite number of hours in it, and you’re going to spend some of those hours voluntarily making yourself sad? listening to music that exists specifically to make you feel worse than you did before you pressed play? i genuinely do not understand this. you don’t live life to be sad. you live it to be happy. melancholic music is a choice to move in the wrong direction on purpose, and i refuse to make it.
i want to listen to sultans of swing and feel like mark knopfler is personally telling me everything is going to be fine. i want iron man at full volume on a trail. i want the version of reality where i’m winning, not the version where i’m sitting in the dark contemplating how everything is meaningless. one of those is useful. the other is self-inflicted damage dressed up as depth.
this is a choice most people don’t realize they’re making. every time you press play, you’re picking an emotional state and injecting it directly into your nervous system. radiohead is negative energy, medium intensity. it makes you feel things, but the things are heavy. dadrock is positive energy, high intensity. it also makes you feel things, but the things are “i am invincible and this guitar solo agrees.”
on a mountain, exhausted, alone — that choice is the whole game.
and it compounds.
music triggers dopamine — the same chemical your brain releases for food, for sex, for anything it considers worth repeating. but here’s the part that matters: the dopamine hits before the peak. when you know a song, when you know the build is coming, when you know the voice is about to crack on that note — your brain releases the reward chemical in anticipation. you’re not just feeling good. you’re feeling good about feeling good that’s about to happen.
stack that on top of emotional contagion and you get something closer to what i actually experienced on that mountain. my body was breaking down. my brain was simultaneously mirroring the emotional state of every song — confident, loud, alive — and flooding itself with dopamine every time a chorus approached. the mountain didn’t get shorter. but i was chemically, emotionally incapable of caring that it was tall.
dadrock is almost uniquely good at this. most of the playlist sits between 100 and 130 bpm, and the dominant energy is loud, confident, forward-moving. even the slower tracks — simple man, old man, breathe, wish you were here, once upon a time in the west — carry a warmth that pulls you forward instead of dragging you down. and when your legs are failing on a volcanic switchback at 1600 meters, forward motion is the only thing you need.
after pico ruivo i descended to achada do teixeira and camped. then came the brutal day.
35 kilometers along the coast to machico. this is the part of madeira that doesn’t make the instagram posts. no levada walks, no viewpoints with railings. just trail, forest, coastline, and distance.
i crossed a river. i had blisters on both feet that had been building for days. at one point i slipped on a steep forest section and fell about three meters down a cliff, grabbing at roots and dirt, pack shifting on my back, the kind of fall where you lie there for a second afterwards just checking if everything still works.
everything still worked. i got up and kept walking.
and the dadrock kept playing.
this is where the science stops being academic. when you’re seven days into a solo hike, blistered, bruised, and facing 35 kilometers of coastline with no way out except forward, music isn’t a nice-to-have. it’s structural support. the first three days without it were beautiful, raw, profound in their silence. but they were also harder in a way that has nothing to do with terrain.
without music, your brain turns inward. there’s a mode your brain switches to when it has no external input — the thing that runs rumination, self-referential thought, the 2am spirals. on a trail alone, with nothing but footsteps and wind, that mode has hours of uninterrupted runtime. some of what it produces is beautiful. the PR1.3 wildcamp, the tears from happiness, the feeling of being alive — that was your brain doing its best work in silence. but it can also produce its worst. doubt, loneliness, the slow accumulation of discomfort with nobody to share it.
music interrupts that loop. but it doesn’t just give your brain something to process — it tells your brain how to feel while processing it. that’s the difference between silence and dadrock. silence lets your brain run whatever it wants, good or bad. dadrock overrides the channel. it says: you’re not tired, you’re not lonely, you’re not wondering if this was a mistake. you’re on a mountain and this guitar solo is for you.
and when the song is right — when it’s dream on at a lookout, or sweet child o’ mine on a ridgeline, or money for nothing on a long flat stretch — it doesn’t just interrupt the loop. it replaces it with something that makes you want to keep walking.
the last stretch was camacha to poiso.
i’d finished the machico leg, taken a taxi to PR8, and started walking up from camacha to the camp. a steep road. calves on fire. but i’d switched from music to something else: formula 1 on my phone.
trekking poles in one hand, phone in the other, watching lewis hamilton win his first race with ferrari.
i know how that sounds. a guy walking up a mountain watching F1 on his phone. but that’s the thing about being alone for a week — you stop performing normalcy. there’s nobody to look weird for. nobody to explain yourself to. you just do whatever the moment calls for, and in that moment, the moment called for hamilton and a steep hill.
he won. i was happy. not in the way you’re happy when your team wins back home on the couch. happy in the way you can only be when you’re sunburned, exhausted, alone on a foreign island, and the universe hands you a small perfect thing for no reason.
i think about that week constantly.
160 kilometers. 6200 meters up. one playlist. two moments of crying — one from solitude, one from aerosmith. a river crossing, a cliff fall, blisters that took weeks to heal. lewis hamilton winning a grand prix on a phone screen held in a trembling hand.
the science explains the mechanism. music mirrors emotion into your nervous system, floods you with dopamine before the chorus even hits, overrides your brain’s tendency to spiral inward when left alone. all true. all measurable. all completely insufficient to describe what it actually feels like when the right song plays at the right moment on the right mountain.
your brain is a machine that runs on inputs. change the input, change the experience. three days of silence gave me the rawest, most present version of myself. the dadrock gave me the version that could keep going when the raw version wanted to stop.
both versions were real. both versions cried. both versions felt more alive than i probably will all year.
— alex
dream on at 1818 meters. your legs are done. steven tyler doesn’t care.