More Thoughts on My Dialogue with Music

I am older, but still young. Young enough. I am old enough, now, to be able to look back. And I'm still having the same conversations.

I can look back and realize that I've kept at something, kept at a vocation, of sorts, for a sizable amount of time. At least, that time is sizable when compared to how long I've been alive.

And I have never felt more alive than when I'm in the varying ecstasies of connecting to a piece of music.

I’m at least old enough now to be able to say that my life has become something; become about something... 

It’s become a series of interpretations. I don’t write to create—I write to interpret creations. I have come to appreciate the virtue or value of this work.

An artist can put themselves, their emotions, their disputations, their hopes, their dreams, their loves, their secrets, their pain, their truths... into a piece, like a song, and it can be forthright and candid and certain..., or it can be abstract—either way, there can still be ten or 50 or 100 other meanings that that music will manifest for each unique listener.

What I have always found to be so beautiful about music is not only its capacity as mood-enhancement, but as a supplement for processing emotion, for harvesting meaning out of our experiences, and as a catalyst for discovery, illumination, and enrichment.

Not all music achieves this. Or, not all music that we listen to is required to is required to achieve this. But that such a profound link can, at least, have the possibility to occur...is enough for me.

From one mind, the artist’s, discerning meaning from their own human experience and emotions, then to their pen, to their page, to their instrument, to their amp, to the studio, to the mixing, and then performed, and recited, and played for the ears of others, absorbed then, into their experience.

Music is here for you to get in touch with something. We are, as we age, locked in...to our job, our routine, our diets, our habits, our hobbies, and we are locked in to our sense of ourselves. Music, as however fleeting a reverie it can be, unlocks that sense of self. New-feeling muscles of compassion and contemplation can be awakened and stimulated.

Imagine a door at the end of a short, darkened hallway, and from behind, at the edges of the doors frame, light emits. The rectangle glows ever brighter. You can see it. You can almost hear it. That light is music—it can be music, or it can be other profound mediums of artistic expression. Can you say for certain that you always open that door, bathe in the light—to the point where you’re listening with your eyes closed?

It has been a rewarding “life” (or at least a chunk of this life, so far) to be someone who not only always opens that door, but wanders far inward, blinded at first, but attaining visibility...clarity, perspective, studying the light source, especially, and the ultraviolet varieties emanating from that source.    

Inspiration, raw inspiration, is channeled and translated into a piece of art—like music—attaining its own kind of luminescence. It’s the artist revealing themselves to you “in a language we all understand.”

It’s been my role, as interpreter, as interviewer, to find and define what might have been left unsaid. That’s the dialogue with music. It’s never a dull conversation.

And you don’t have to worry about what to say next. Listen.

Listen.

I never know how long or how much longer I’ll do this. It’s just that a new light always turns on—a new door can be opened. There’s something different to find, to hear, to think about, in each room.

So I’ll keep listening.

And since you visited and read all this, here's a quick playlist of songs I was listening to as I wrote this