For weeks now: an ode to music
A musing on the role of music in my life as it stands currently
For weeks now, I’ve been trying to write a piece in theme with my birthday. Some wise musing on what this year has meant to me or what I’ve meant to this year. But while I have ideas, I can’t seem to generate anything lasting enough to put on the page. The thoughts sit there, on the tip of my tongue, growing in meaning and style, like words you’d whisper to lost friends if you ever did see them for coffee.
I don’t know yet.
I find myself saying those words more and more these days, as my childhood arrogance is run down against the friction-filled surface that is being in your twenties. The sandpaper to every idea and every dream I’ve ever had. I don’t know yet. I thought I did but I don’t or I never did.
In high school, my environmental science teacher Bruce Brough drew three concentric circles in pale chalk, a symbol to categorize every piece of information that could exist: the things you do know, the things you don’t know, the things you don’t know you don’t know. But what about the things you thought you knew but now you don’t? That goes in the second circle, Bruce would probably tell me. Somehow, though, this feels different.
I have hit the stage where I am unlearning things I believed to be core. I am beginning the part where I start forgiving myself for being wrong in the first place.
Being in your twenties is like taking a bath in the second circle.
It is wanting to be a writer, a business mogul, a world explorer, a homebody. It is wanting to be surrounded by friends and also wanting to be alone.
It is wanting years to go by so you can be promoted, more settled and it’s never wanting the night to end.
It is filling out the question “what is your passion” on job applications, using the entirety of the word limit, but doubting each line.
It is trying to tell people how much they mean and never quite being able to put it into words.
It is trying to tell yourself what you mean and not knowing that either.
It is finding some answers in lines of poems or lyrics of songs.
Which brings me to the original point for writing this: an ode to music.
All of that above. That was all a way of saying I don’t know. That priorities and interests shift. That friends grow distant. That family grows more distant too. That what was important to me last year, last week, yesterday, maybe isn’t anymore. But like with any successful science experiment there are controls. Interests and beliefs that withstand coming of age. And a control for me my entire life has always been a love for music.
I grew up tinkering on the piano, somehow able to translate songs from my head to the ivory keys without sheet music, my fingers guiding themselves as I hummed the song in my head. I spent my primary school years belting the lyrics to Oliver’s Gary Indiana or Les Misérables’ Castle on a Cloud as my dad played piano instrumental. In long car rides in middle school, I listened to Young the Giant’s Cough Syrup on repeat so many times that it still shows up as my number one most listened to song.
There were always messages in music for me. Riffs that made my foot tap. Lyrics so well written they bounced.
And then when I got older, music became like an imaginary friend, relatable, kind, able to be willed in every emotional direction. And songs became both battle cries and flags that marked moments in the sand. This Year by The Mountain Goats would blast through my earbuds on route to every ACT practice test my junior year, reminding myself that in the next years things could get better. Jenny Jenkins by Mt Joy through air pods on runs through sun-strewn, wooded forest trails my freshman year at Dartmouth, a sign that things did indeed get better. The Only Living Boy in New York by Simon and Garfunkel as I passed over that bridge, heading home from college one last time.
In this age when I can be anything but maybe only if I decide soon, there are concerts that have shaped the way I want to be. The Wood Brothers when they quiet the crowd to sing The Muse, reclaiming the room to get their point across. Noah Kahan spending a minute to match a story to each song. And there is Maggie Rogers, Maggie who appeared at Roadrunner this February in a shaggy pixie cut and short, black sequined dress, who created an aesthetic and an energy so genuine and fresh it had me folding my hair back, mimicking her shag in front of mirrors for weeks. Maggie had a presence that I didn’t know I wanted, but I need it now.
With a rolodex of friends who I love but now live away from, songs have become the bridge across this newfound distance. I send songs like sticky notes on kitchen fridges, like lipstick scrawled messages on bathroom mirrors, each one hand picked based on a known interest of or a recent conversation with its recipient, to show, in a 3-minute banger, that I am thinking of them.
Songs have become community. Playlists stand like warm, yellow wallpaper to insulate great hang outs. Concerts exist as plans for Friday nights with old friends or places to create new (fleeting) friendships. Like a film store, people just seem to have more to say to strangers when they’re in line.
And song lyrics have become spoon fed explanations for what I am thinking, putting sentences in my mouth using words I know but haven’t yet been able to string together. Sending floods down from the low hanging clouds in my mind like warm air. It rains something so refreshing I want to stick out my tongue to catch it — in that drop, the taste of knowing.
Love this