Music of my life, part 2

[For the first part of this blog, please read the next entry below, then come back to this entry]

Piano went on to thread itself in and out of my life ever since, becoming the instrument (pardon the pun) of involvement in some summer camps as I led the worship time with my friend Mark Shrime a few summers. Fortunately, not a lot of actual musical knowledge involves itself in camp music - if you know C, D, G and F, you can play most of the songs I grew up on. During this time, my shyness completely engulfed my life so these experiences really got me in front of people in a way I never would've been otherwise. It also induced mild panic. Still, some songs take me to a simpler time where my biggest concern was sitting next to Melanie Vaughn on the hayride while singing "In the stars His handiwork I see" or assisting the crazy barefooted guitar player who broke a string everytime he played because of his wild style.

And who knows why songs enrapture our souls in such a way. I theorize that perhaps we can boil down that rapture to such simple terms as the shared emotional experience. Maybe we struggle with expression and a song can shoulder the responsibility for our lack of words. Or maybe, just perhaps, our very souls are tied to music. Ever noticed how different cultures employ completely different lyrical ways of speaking? Of voice inflection? How jarring can another culture seem when confronted by such different voice inflection? Music exists just in basic conversation - the other day, while sitting at a booth inside a Chili's, a gentleman behind us sat there calmly with a woman and then replied to her soft spoken question directly into a voice box he held up to his neck. While the words still came out effectively, the tone of mechanical spoken word certainly stood out, and no doubt exists in my head that some social ostracization occurs due to that.

Oddly enough, we even place that music into other people's words, especially written. When we read a paragraph, we form the sentences in our head with a musical inflection based on our own styles and memories. Ever written an email that someone else completely misunderstood based on different inflection or emphasis? Happens to me all the time (although many would quickly point out that I look at life in an unusual fashion and therefore write in a very non-normal way). That's the music of life - of conversation - right there.

Right now as I write my stream of consciousness down (that's how I write these types of musing - just an unedited stream), Corinne Bailey Rae, "Like a Star" is playing on my Jango.com radio (great Internet streaming site, by the way). Oddly enough to me, music played by artists almost always spoke to me without the words making much of an impact. In fact, regurgitating words out to you from my favorite songs would be a purely fruitless exercise as I'm fairly disconnected from the lyrics, almost exclusively bonding myself to the underlying music. I would venture to guess that some of my favorite songs contain questionable lyrics, even. Yet, does that truly matter? Take the best lyricist of our day and sing the lyrics to a generic country song and I doubt seriously that I'd enjoy it. Yet, take a country writer's words and let Sting perform it and see how I react. Not that words have no place in our lives or in songs but that certainly doesn't drive me to turn on my radio, either, which may be a reason NPR has no place in my favorites list. Words have their own significance, but music to me exists as an expression already of emotion, stories, ideas, wishes, dreams, missed opportunities, loss, hope and more. Unless directly coupled together (and who can say, when your interpretation of music easily diverges from mine when this truly exists in agreement anyway), songs exist more of two ideas playing at the same time. Like two people speaking at the same time, I may listen to one person over the other but even if the two ideas coincide, the chorus of both may distract. Very rarely would the written words transcend the underlying music to me, and often the music trumps the lyrics to a point where only the voice inflection works its way into my subconscious, leaving the words discarded.

These days, I often build my own soundtrack to life just in simple trips to the store or to my nearby Chik Fil A, grabbing a mood from my CD stack or iPhone and incorporating it into my drive. How different does life appear on a cloudless soft 70 degree evening with Norah Jones filling my car compared to a hot 100 degree drive in bumper to bumper traffic with Metallica blasting? Quite a bit - and the music actually affects my mood and desires. Absolutely, music integrates to me at such a level that I must state that music wires itself into our souls; that our souls are music and a deep connection exists between our very beings and the language we shoveled into the "arts" category. We believe ourselves somehow disconnected from the things around us sometimes, sending people off to study "math" and "music" and the like without fully appreciating or understanding how much these building blocks actually create who we are.