: You Have to Be Sad to Write a Sad Song, You Have to Be in Love to Write a Love Song…
"Songs all evoke different memories and feelings from people. Listening to them will take you back to other times and places, when you were thinking about certain things and you were in certain situations or environments. The present can add to the fray, but you can't erase the base. Other things will trigger memories as well; but nothing like music. There’s a certain presence that washes over you and you're gone. Once you've lived your life in the past, you can't escape it. Nostalgia or something worse will overwhelm you, leaving you a willing participant regardless of your own wishes"
It's one of those days - the sky pulls scarves of white and grey across its blue, the last leaves on a tree in winter flutter like impatient butterflies before a migration, a trace of the chicken factory blows up the hill on a wind - and there's homework to be done.
I grab a caffeine free coke, snag my laptop, and bound over the pile of unwashed clothes that are sprawled on the bed. I connect my laptop to the hi-fi internet, type a few search criteria into my MP3 player, push off some unwanted clothes into the floor, and finally hit the shuffle and play buttons. And get to work.
What has all this to do with each other? Well it's about preparing a space for contemplation, a time of mining for meaning and memory, and somehow smooth typing and listening to a semi-random sample of my music collection can consistently give that to me more than any other activity. I’ve always been a firm believer that my life as a movie would have a soundtrack set to it. Songs can just play at the right moment and express every feeling within an entire body. When that happens, something clicks.
Why? First because music for me must be personal, untainted by the canned perceptions of MTV videos, the bare lines of literal lyrics or the meager insights of the CD cover notes. A song is an encapsulated experience that you can re-live and re-interpret each time. A song is also a permeable moment; it affects the character of everything else that is simultaneously seen, heard or touched, while itself being felt and remembered with everything else that lives in the memory of that moment.
But why typing? Because it adds a tactile quality and a minor rhythmic kinesthetic dimension that substantiates the acoustic ambience of my music. Meanwhile my mind can float in a sea of memory, pulled here by a moment when a song played before, or tethered there by a triggered memory of someone, a moment in time, or a place inside that may have been forgotten.
I'm reminded of the narrative at the end of American Beauty where Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) ponders his own little life; like Lester, I am grateful just for the privilege of being, and even more grateful that music and the simple physical act of homework can give me a perspective of timelessness that allows me to experience my own existence as a virtual eternity. Play on sweet music of memory, until I am myself only a memory.
It's one of those days - the sky pulls scarves of white and grey across its blue, the last leaves on a tree in winter flutter like impatient butterflies before a migration, a trace of the chicken factory blows up the hill on a wind - and there's homework to be done.
I grab a caffeine free coke, snag my laptop, and bound over the pile of unwashed clothes that are sprawled on the bed. I connect my laptop to the hi-fi internet, type a few search criteria into my MP3 player, push off some unwanted clothes into the floor, and finally hit the shuffle and play buttons. And get to work.
What has all this to do with each other? Well it's about preparing a space for contemplation, a time of mining for meaning and memory, and somehow smooth typing and listening to a semi-random sample of my music collection can consistently give that to me more than any other activity. I’ve always been a firm believer that my life as a movie would have a soundtrack set to it. Songs can just play at the right moment and express every feeling within an entire body. When that happens, something clicks.
Why? First because music for me must be personal, untainted by the canned perceptions of MTV videos, the bare lines of literal lyrics or the meager insights of the CD cover notes. A song is an encapsulated experience that you can re-live and re-interpret each time. A song is also a permeable moment; it affects the character of everything else that is simultaneously seen, heard or touched, while itself being felt and remembered with everything else that lives in the memory of that moment.
But why typing? Because it adds a tactile quality and a minor rhythmic kinesthetic dimension that substantiates the acoustic ambience of my music. Meanwhile my mind can float in a sea of memory, pulled here by a moment when a song played before, or tethered there by a triggered memory of someone, a moment in time, or a place inside that may have been forgotten.
I'm reminded of the narrative at the end of American Beauty where Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) ponders his own little life; like Lester, I am grateful just for the privilege of being, and even more grateful that music and the simple physical act of homework can give me a perspective of timelessness that allows me to experience my own existence as a virtual eternity. Play on sweet music of memory, until I am myself only a memory.