Music = Life

Yeah, I stole that phrase from Hot Topic. It says it all for me. Every song I hear, I can remember either an incident in my life or the first time I heard the song or the feeling I had at some point when hearing that song; where I was, what I was doing. I think of my mind as a relational database with a complex index, and music is very much a part of that index.

How to discuss the intense importance music has in my life? There are so many ways, so I will explore a few of them here.

First is the strong flash of memory I will have when hearing a song. I can picture that incident or place or person that evoked feelings in me mimicked in the song. When I hear "Wild Horses", I can smell salt water, feel the sand beneath my feet and remember a hellish night when I was a sophomore in high school, tripping on the beach, and someone decided they didn't "like me" and tried to pick a fight with me. Her name was Gail and I remember the psychedelic terror I felt, as I was a lover, not a fighter (at least in that part of my life). When I hear "Like a Rolling Stone", I can see myself as a 12 year old, walking down Sterling Road in Trumbull, CT, listening to the song on my transistor radio, held up to my ear and contemplating the nature of the grating sound of Bob Dylan's voice as opposed to the delight and immediate identification I felt with the lyrics of the song. "Terrible Lie" brings me to the NIN Self Destruct Tour, standing there, mesmerized by Trent Reznor, swaying to the music and singing at the top of my lungs, totally in love with him and his music. I can still feel the energy in the room, it was so powerful as to be overwhelming and I see my beautiful, young daughter next to me, sharing and delighting in the experience. I can see the clothes we were wearing, I can smell the crowd; the sweat and the testosterone just oozing all over the place. The smoke filled room was like a complete break with reality, as if we were the only people on earth and this was the surreal moment to be in, right here, right now. "What a Wonderful World" sends me to 1998, on July 4th, sitting on the levee in front of the arch in St Louis and watching the fireworks over the river. "Shine on, you Crazy Diamond" carries me to the deck of my house in Vermont in 1981, standing there, listening to it blasting on my stereo and looking out over the mountain I just bought, absolutely delighted with the awesome natural beauty and the dramatic buildup of that song in my ears, my arms held out wide, welcoming the experience and my new home. There are so many of these, almost every song evokes a memory, and I could fill up a hundred blogs with these memories.

Many times the memories are attached to live performances by the artists. I mentioned one of those above, NIN, and those who know me know that I am obsessed by live music and will spend many dollars going to see musical performances that I feel I can't miss. I have traveled across state lines, across a thousand miles just to attend a performance I needed to hear. I have been going to concerts since I was 10, and I can recall everything from Jimi Hendrix to the Doors, the Four Seasons to Charles Mingus and Taj Majal. This is probably my most strongest addiction. There simply isn't anything I have ever felt that comes close to the energy that is generated between an artist on stage and the reaction in the audience. It can be so powerful as to stagger me or bring me to tears or to dance until I want to drop and to just laugh in delight. What can be better than the incredible power of Metallica on a stage and the amazing connection they have with their audience; you can just feel the love and the excitement right down to your bones shaking from the volume. Or to sit in a symphony hall and listen to a Beethoven Symphony being performed, where you can hear a pin drop in the audience and see how they are completely absorbed in every sound coming from the orchestra. How can I describe the shiver of delight I feel when I am at a performance and the artist picks exactly the song I wanted to hear? Many songs will evoke artists' performances for me and, again, if I listed them all, I would fill up pages and pages of these memories. I have a collection of ticket stubs that dates back decades and I treasure every one of those performances; I can recall every one of them and hear them in my head, see them in my mind and most importantly, I can FEEL them as if they happened yesterday..

Then, of course, there are the breakup songs. Everyone has them; I'm sure of it. I have at least one attached to every breakup, with possibly one exception. These are songs that will immediately overwhelm me with the feeling of sadness I felt when they were adopted as a breakup song. Once I made a cassette tape of all of them, and found that I really couldn't listen to all of them like that, so I chucked it after creating it. A partial list of these songs would include: No Regrets, Tom Rush; Wish You were Here, Pink Floyd; You Can't Always Get What You Want, The Rolling Stones; Missing You, John Waite; Flyaway, Joan Osborne and Jesse, Joan Baez. It doesn't matter how long ago the breakup was, hearing these songs will always evoke sadness and a lump in my throat, if not tears in my eyes. These are the sad breakup songs, there are also angry breakup songs. My current favorite that my daughter shared with me is called Aftermath by a band named Battery. It has surpassed You Oughta Know by Alanis Morissette as my favorite pissed off breakup song.

But that is the purpose of songs, I believe. It is to express an emotion, a feeling about an incident, a statement of position on an issue; there are multiple reasons that drive someone to write a song. Sometimes that purpose isn't so clear and sometimes it shines out, as clear as the blue sky in Vermont on a beautiful summer day. Songs, of course, are open to interpretation, and you may not hear in a song what the writer heard when they wrote it. Actually this is quite common, and there are many artists who won't discuss the "meaning" of their lyrics, preferring to allow the audience to draw their own conclusions. So, following that train of thought, I "use" songs to express the emotions and incidents in my own life. I feel a connection to the artist who wrote the song and a sense of appreciation that they were so incredibly capable as to connect me to my world with something as beautiful and wondrous as music.

So, I sought to share this appreciation and wonder with my child. I began singing to her while she was still in the womb, and have continued that practice for all the years we have shared together. Bedtime always included a song along with a book,and I sang her folk songs and children songs and love songs, everything I could muster up in my arsenal to entertain her and share with her the sounds of music. There was always music playing in our house, and she heard music from many decades in her first years. She was at her first live concert at the ripe old age of two, when we drove from Vermont to New York City to take her to hear Stevie Ray Vaughan at Carnegie Hall. It was an evening performance, and the first time she was ever in NYC. Her father and I each had a death grip on her hands, while she walked along, staring up in wonder at the very tall buildings she had never seen before. It is, of course, quite a different environment than the mountain she lived on, and I could see her fascination with the Big Apple, all the concrete and the buildings, all the sounds and smells, the myriad crowd hustling by her as we walked her from the deli we took her to eat dinner to the concert hall. As far as I could see, she was the only toddler in the audience, and I was as delighted with her reaction to the music as I was with the music itself. She stood on her seat and danced the night away, entertaining both her parents and the people around us. We drove her to Tanglewood when she was four, where the Boston Symphony Orchestra performs in the summer. I specifically chose that night because they were going to perform Beethoven's Ninth, and after hearing a rousing performance of Holtz' The Planets, there was an announcement of a program change and the 9th wasn't going to be performed. I was dismally disappointed, when, to my delight, the reason for the change was announced and Itzhak Perlman took the stage and filled the night with the beautiful sounds of his virtuoso violin performance, accompanied by Yo Yo Ma, who,of course, works with the BSO. We laid on a blanket outside with a picnic dinner and just gloried in the joyous melodic sounds coming from the stage. As she grew older, I began to take her to more and more concerts, to the point where ALL my vacation time and money was spent going to concerts, taking her and her friends along for the fun. One of the most joyous and gratifying days of my life was the day when she returned the favor and brought me some new music I hadn't heard before. She handed me a tape called Rage Against the Machine and I smiled a broad smile, thanked her and we continued on our constant concert quest, including, of course, a rousing and inspiring performance of Rage at the Wallace Arena in Fitchburg, MA. We continue to attend performances today when we can, and I always enjoy sharing a musical experience with my favorite person. I am happy that she has adopted my love for music. Unfortunately, she did not get my ability to sing or play music, but that does not diminish the fact that she has the love for music that I do.

Performance, that is where I will end this discussion. I learned to play the organ at the age of six, and took organ lessons for the better part of 10 years. I could sight read, play and sing songs, and did so for the entertainment of my family. Then, I stopped. I continued to sing along with music in my vast collection, but the performance of music was absent in my life until two years ago. I began to sing with my good friend, who is a singer and rhythm guitar player. We sound really good together, and slowly, we began to build up a repertoire of songs and an act that we took public. I have found this to be an enormous stress reducer and something that generates a large amount of joy in my life. Stage performance is something that I am still learning about every day, and I definitely glory in it. I love singing and having the opportunity to get up on a stage and mic up the performance is a unique and delightful experience that brings me great happiness. I hope to be able to continue to do this for a long time to come. My partner has been encouraging me to begin to write music, and so far, the verses come out sounding like I'm a sophomore in high school again, where I wrote most of my poetry. I am keeping at it, in hopes that my thoughts can be better and more maturely expressed and I can actually produce a song. This will be the pinnacle of achievement for me, and I am very grateful for my partner's support and patience while I feel my way along this unfamiliar but yet oddly familiar road. I am still finding my voice and sing cover songs; it is still most entertaining and I love every second of it. My daughter joins in the fun by assisting me in buying stage clothes and helping to make me the "rock star" she says I have always been. It's all wonderful and new and exciting, easily the best thing I am currently doing in my life. Making music as opposed to experiencing it contains an entirely new set of feelings and I am simply in love with it. It feels as if I am completing the circle and this just feels right to me. It completes my lifetime love affair with music and makes me feel whole.