Oh, carve me out!
I love music. I listen to it while i'm cleaning, reading, sewing, working, driving, whenever. I listen while I drive to the shows of bands I've never seen before. When I get there, I shake what my mama gave me. I am a modest but exuberent member of the scene.
Regardless of your personal music habits, you may have noticed that when you do it often enough, music-listening can become automatic. You only hit "play" because you always do, not because you consciously love it or need it. The notes blur into the background and all you end up hearing is the most colorful of all brands of white noise.
Occasionally, however, there is a song that pulls your from your musical stupor, the one that becomes the exception to the rule. The one that makes me close my eyes during whatever I'm doing (except driving, thankfully, when I just roll down the windows and crank up the volume and let loose like I'm in an invisible fortress), and just listen. The kind of song, you've heard it, that feels so real you could crawl up inside it. The notes or words feel like they've fallen out of your soul and all you can do in that moment is be in it, because that is the only thing that puts them back exactly where they belong.
You real song is rarely someone else's real song, because you are completely unique and your reality is no one else's. Or, perhaps, more people than you'd think share your reality and are all basking in individual glows at the same moment and your number one priority should be to seek them out. Whichever or whatever is correct, those most powerful songs introvert even the most flagrant extrovert, leaving her gasping for breath in the deep importance of reality and struggling to remain submerged in it a little longer, to make the feeling last just a few seconds beyond the final outro.
Now that's what I call music.
Regardless of your personal music habits, you may have noticed that when you do it often enough, music-listening can become automatic. You only hit "play" because you always do, not because you consciously love it or need it. The notes blur into the background and all you end up hearing is the most colorful of all brands of white noise.
Occasionally, however, there is a song that pulls your from your musical stupor, the one that becomes the exception to the rule. The one that makes me close my eyes during whatever I'm doing (except driving, thankfully, when I just roll down the windows and crank up the volume and let loose like I'm in an invisible fortress), and just listen. The kind of song, you've heard it, that feels so real you could crawl up inside it. The notes or words feel like they've fallen out of your soul and all you can do in that moment is be in it, because that is the only thing that puts them back exactly where they belong.
You real song is rarely someone else's real song, because you are completely unique and your reality is no one else's. Or, perhaps, more people than you'd think share your reality and are all basking in individual glows at the same moment and your number one priority should be to seek them out. Whichever or whatever is correct, those most powerful songs introvert even the most flagrant extrovert, leaving her gasping for breath in the deep importance of reality and struggling to remain submerged in it a little longer, to make the feeling last just a few seconds beyond the final outro.
Now that's what I call music.
Comments