all of it built on 2 chords. straight soul. the kids call it “swag”
A Few Words on Music
Sometimes I listen to music and I feel my heart punching out of my chest, like it’s been prematurely stuffed in a coffin and needs to pound its way out. I’ve been wanting to write about music for a long time and I still can’t summon the right words. It’s just so fucking visceral. Music rips you up and shreds you. I can’t write about music because it’s more than emotion. It’s this indescribable experience where each song is like a life: all the growth and change and harmony and discord of a lifetime condensed into four minutes. This is what makes music relatable and diverse and indescribable - how does one articulate life? Every song is a life. Some are bland and mediocre and others are sung by Donny Hathaway. Some lives are shy and others are Freddie Mercury. Some songs are trite, or boring or unoriginal and some lives are too. I’d argue that our taste in music should expand as we mature and gain a deeper appreciation for life - seeing beauty and value in places we hadn’t before. If you make strong, sweeping judgments about entire ‘categories’ of music, you probably feel the same way about certain categories of people and lifestyles too. Every song is a unique life, don’t be a bigot.
I don’t mean to sound bombastic with some overwrought metaphor about life and music, but music is fucking awesome. It’s 4 AM and I’m psychotic on caffeine and amped from all the fist pumps I threw watching fireworks. I killed the lights to calm down, slid on my headphones and lost myself for a few hours. Actually, that’s not true, I found myself for a few hours. Nothing sustains focus like music. My greatest joy is when a song is allowed to be foreground noise: every high hat, every note, every hand clap, the lightly throbbing wurlitzer somewhere, all of it. The perfectly timed first syllable of a lyric and the breath that comes before it. It’s so undeniably real. It’s life.
The first musical memory I have is of my dad playing rhiannon on his new hi-fi. That modest-but-unstoppable guitar lick, the light cymbal roll right before the bass lumbers in, the keys tinkling in and out between the snares on every two, lindsey’s syncopated right thumb - and that’s just the first 14 seconds. It builds and brews like the witch it is and a perfectly suited voice sings a perfectly suited melody. Perfect. If you don’t like rhiannon, fuck you. It’s still real to me dammit, not because I understand anything stevie nicks is [ever] singing about, but because it tells me I have a past. The song was a time and place and it’s followed me to wherever I am each time I hear it. It’s a reminder that life has a past and a present. Put life in the foreground and focus, listen for things you’ve never heard, remember the things you’ve already learned.
I can’t think of anything else on earth that can release endorphins like a good song. Like shots of life racing through your veins. Ever hear a brand new song that you instantly love? Nothing in life is as pure and raw as that. When I hear a new song I love, I know I love it immediately. There is no deliberation. It’s no surprise that the most common subject of music is love; I know what love is because of music. A good song rips your heart out, punches you in the gut and induces a serene, knowing smile. A good woman will do the same.
Music is truth. Even when it’s sampled and sliced and mashed up and scratched and beat boxed and autotuned and thumped over a tired old house beat, it’s truth. Perhaps a relative truth, but truth nonetheless. We can’t hide from it: we love what we love and hate what we hate. The brain engages in no mental gymnastics to love or hate a song. Go ahead, try to give yourself every opportunity to love a song you hate because a friend wrote it or a respected musician recommended it. It doesn’t work, the ear wants what it wants. The ear remains objective and unbiased because it can only enjoy what is true to itself. What a beautiful gift that is: to know who we are because we can’t help but love what we love. Music hones that gift like nothing else and I have a duty to maintain it for as long as I live.
Sounds good to me.
This is my favorite music-related read in the past 5 years.
Bonnie makes me want to get older. Soul is never precocious. (start at 0:55)
kick•ass (kik’as’), adj., 1. characterized by or pertaining to Guns N’ Roses in 1988
A Face Among the Crowd by Jackie Greene
Seems like it was only yesterday Now that I’m a man and I’m fully grown Every time I look into the mirror I see you standing there I’ve been working hard most every night If you can keep your head and carry on I remember standing next to you
I was just a boy yearning to run
You always seemed so tall, uniform and all
Funny how some things they never change
I stand and face the world all by myself
If what they say is true: I’m a lot like you
Then I know we’re sharing more than just a name
Everyday I realize you’re more a part of me
I am but a face among the crowd
I hope i’ve made you proud
Hope I’m half the man you thought I’d be.
Singing all my songs under the spotlight
Sometimes it gets so rough
I feel I’ve had enough
But I recall the words you said to me
You can share your strength with those in need
You can watch it all cave in
Get up and build again
Why then you’ll be a man I do believe
To see how tall I grew
I remember falling down and scraping up my knee
I am but a face among the crowd
Hope I’ve made you proud
I hope I’m half the man you taught me to be
good lord i love this man. as talented as he is fat - best of both worlds.
you know that generation who started listening to music in the boy band craze and picked up a guitar because of john mayer? this is what happens when they apply talent to that history.
tim koda. i can say i knew him when. universe, give this guy whatever he wants.
