Music, Music, and more Music

This post is brought to you care of the immortal John Lee Hooker and at the prompting of more than one of you. JLH is thrumming away as I write this. I love the blues, especially the old school blues. I’ve been teaching my son to play the blues on the guitar he’s beginning to understand the mechanics but he doesn’t yet have the mileage to carry it off. Ah well, life has a way of teaching you that sort of thing. Youth is really wasted on the young. I’m not exactly sure when it happened and that’s probably because it sneaks up on you. Somewhere I lost my immortality and it started to hurt when I fell down. I quit exercising every day and later even once a week, then once a month, then once a year, etc… At some point, I just gave up trying to fight the inevitable and gained eighty pounds I don’t need.

At least that’s what the old voices in my head tell me. Recently, I’ve been blessed. I got divorced and realized that I wasn’t happy. I got out on my own and got reacquainted with myself. I learned to value my time with my children. I got my shit together and had the good fortune to find a woman who loves me for who I am, who appreciates what I do, who treats me like I’m her hero. I quit a job that I’d hated for years. I got my priorities straight and went back to school and promptly got them screwed up again and then straightened them out again. I got married again and inherited three lovely children who are starting to call me Dad. It’s looking again like we’re going to get a house and we just recently got a new vehicle. Go figure, life does get better if I just get out of the way.

Music for me is not merely soothing, it’s curative. I have, on many occasions, played through a succession of tunes at random and found myself in entirely different mental space. When I listen to music, a segment of a song can lead me to another song which, in turn, leads me to another song. I cannot tell you in advance where and when the journey will end. This has proved to be frustrating in the extreme for anyone that has had to watch and listen to this process. I tend to have two to four pieces of music juxtaposed in my mind at any given time - usually one is classical, another rock, sometimes one is R&B, and the other is usually Jazz or the blues. The pieces in my head dictate where I’m going to go when I’m listening to bits and pieces of tunes so I can well imagine, to someone who doesn’t think like I do, that it just looks silly.

When I listen to the music for the first time, I’m only interested in how it makes me feel. If it doesn’t feel right, I don’t like it. This feeling is usually related to the mechanics of how it is put together or performed. The second time I’m usually taking apart the various parts of the song listening to, for example, the bass line, the drums or the guitar line. In the successive times after that I analyze each part individually and then later how they interact. Somewhere around the 9th or 10th time through I start just hearing the song again. All of this ends up getting filtered through the endlessly changing juxtaposition of music in my head. When I saw “Moulin Rouge” for the first time, the music brought tears to my eyes. In one of the early scenes, the composer fugues four tunes against each other. I was blown away because I’d never heard that done anywhere but in my head.

I couldn’t be more happy to be studying music. I’ve always avoided it because it’s never been a “reasonable” career path in that, musicians are generally perceived like most artist - broke. I suppose if I were to get more honest, I haven’t allowed myself to get sucked in to music because I lacked the maturity to avoid becoming completely obsessed and isolated. My need to be with people far outweighed my need for personal satisfaction. Thankfully, time and experience have shown me ways to balance the two. Don’t get me wrong, when I get into my passion and the creativity is flowing, there is nothing to do but ride it out. I’m better about scheduling my time so that people don’t get left out in the cold in this process that and my ability to multitask has improved in recent years.

As I’ve gotten older, and somewhat less egocentric, I’ve begun to suspect that there are others who hear music like I do and who, like I, struggle to find balance while exploring their gifts. Some of them go to college, some do nothing with it, some explore it on their own. I think I’d like to teach music at the college level and through private lessons. I think I’m finally to the point in my life where I have enough mileage and experience that I have something to share. I’d also like to perform occasionally – one never really loses the love of an audience. There’s nothing like it.

I’m not sure if that is at all interesting to any of you but it is a goodly portion of what has been occupying my brain of late. I tend to think I need to be witty or funny or upbeat or whatever to write. What I forget is that people are not always witty, upbeat, or funny but that doesn’t make them any less interesting. So that’s it, life on life’s terms.

RCS