Season 4, Episode 3

This post has little-to-no relevance to any life updates, but came out of a thought I had Friday night as I re-entered my room after a week in Western Maryland with friends.

Music has always been my thing. You know what I mean when I say that, right? Not some random thing that’s fun for me (although it is) or something that I’m good at (although I’d like to say that I am), but something that’s always felt distinctly mine to conquer. I’ve spent a fair amount of my life dedicated to practicing, perfecting, writing, and performing music, some of which can be attributed to my planned progression to music school, but much of it driven by a desire to more intimately relate with myself.

For some people, that activity is painting, or reading, or journaling, or running…Pick any hobby, and you can probably find a person who’s come to some sort of a deep self-understanding from it. I can’t speak to their experiences though, so we’ll have to start with my own.

Music is defined (and by Merriam-Webster, no less!) as “the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity” (because there’s no other way to make something beautiful sound terribly complex than by throwing the words “science,” “temporal,” and “continuity” into a definition and calling it a day). A simpler definition is found directly below it, “vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony” (alright, a bit nicer here, but it still could use some work), before everyone’s favorite dictionary provides my personal favorite definition: “an agreeable sound”.

An agreeable sound. But what makes a sound agreeable? And how can those sounds impact a person?

I’m no expert on music, musical analysis or psychology, but I like to think that sometimes I know my own mind, and what can affect it.

Picture this: You’re in a car, the backseat of a friend’s car, to be specific. It’s mid-March, or early-April, sometime right around Easter, when the air is just starting to warm up, but a light jacket is probably still appropriate due to wind. Your head is leaning against the window as you engage in quiet conversation with your friends in the front seat, when suddenly, the driver turns the volume of his radio up, and the first few notes of an unfamiliar song start to gently play out. You hear a plucked guitar and your ears begin to pick out the different instruments used to create a resonating sound of openness in the background of the melody. Your face is warmed by the early afternoon sun as it beats down on your friend’s vehicle and through the window, and you close your eyes and gently let your mind absorb the song. You hear the residual sounds of what seems to be an electric guitar with a suspension effect gently  setting a bass line; your friend who’s driving is quietly singing along to the lyrics, and you take a deep breath through your nose. You feel the air fill you up, and for the first time in a long time, you feel peaceful.

Flash forward to the next time you hear this song: It’s October, and you and some friends had decided to go see the artist in concert. You arrive at the venue and settle into your seat for the opening acts, before rising for the main artist’s set. The artist begins, and you hear your friend singing along next to you above the instrumentals produced by the band on stage. Occasionally you bump into him and feel the fabric of his shirt as your hand brushes it by mistake. Your personal space feels slightly invaded, but in a comfortable way, and a gentle smile makes its way onto your face as you hear the lone guitar notes being plucked out, but on stage now, instead of in your headphones or projected through the radio via your friend’s aux cord. You stop your movement and exist for a moment, just you and the melody that’s washing over you. Your mind stops worrying that your friend is mad about you bumping into him, your breathing slows and calms. Your eyes close as you softly sing along to the almost-haunting melody that makes your heart swell.

Next: It’s November 22nd, you’re in your bed, trying desperately to sleep even though your mind and body seem determined to keep you awake through the night. You’ve tried reading, listening to a podcast, even doing work, but nothing seems to be working. You go on your laptop, bathing your desk in the dim illumination of the Spotify app as you search up your favorite artist. You make a playlist, give it a description (the only one out of your 20 playlists that has one), “a compilation of songs that are so low there’s almost no way I could ever sing them,” and hope this will work. You press shuffle, hold your breath, and belatedly remember how thankful you are that your roommates aren’t there this weekend so you don’t bother them with the noise at two in the morning. Even with the computer at 50% volume, the plucked strings fill the room with a calming atmosphere. You climb back into bed, let out your breath, and gently fall asleep in the early morning of your second day as a 20-year-old.

It’s almost finals now, and your family has decided to take a trip—a practice that’s been abandoned in recent years due to the busyness of everyone’s schedules—to Western Maryland. Your sister finds a cabin to stay in for a long weekend, and the five of you pack up your cars and head out. The drive out is filled with many a discussion with your mother about the semester so far, what the next few years look like, and some not-so-subtle remarks about your driving skills. Your banter abates after a few hours, and you turn up your music. You’re immediately hit with the guitar introduction of the song you’ve come to love, and you smile quietly and begin telling your mom about the memories you have of this song. You arrive at the cabin and proceed to alternate between tireless studying and photographing your family, but as you stay up late one night and watch the moon rise over the lake beyond the cabin, you switch on the playlist you had made almost a month before. The song starts up again, you listen with your eyes closed before jumping back into your work.

It’s April. You’ve just had one of the most painful verbal beatings of your life. You’re worried that the world is falling apart, even though there’s a part of your mind that says that it’s logically impossible for that to be true. Your breathing quickens and you feel the tears stinging your eyes before they begin to fall. You find yourself doing a melodramatic move that you’ve seen in movies before, as you slide down your bedroom door on your back. Your arms rest on your knees and your whole body shakes with silent tears. After a few minutes, you recite a passage from the Bible that’s always made you feel safe. Your tears slow, your breathing rights itself. You put on some music to calm you down more. The guitar starts playing, and a harmonica joins. You look out the window and see a beautiful sunset. You smile, quietly singing along as your hiccups slow.

It’s the summer. You’ve committed yourself to doing work away from home, to stretching yourself, to bending things until you’re positive they’re going to break. You’re “happy, free, confused, and lonely at the same time,” as Taylor Swift would put it. You know the memories you’re making will hit you deeply as soon as you leave, but in the moment, you’re confused. This summer hasn’t been what you expected. You’re happy, you’re living the dream, but at the same time, you feel like you’ve left a part of you behind with the last school year, something that will never be a part of you in the same way again. You cry more than you’d care to admit. You scream at the bay. You angrily search the Bible to find an explanation for the feelings you have. You miss the community you had back at school, but you know everything’s changed, and it won’t be the same anymore. You realize you’re not all that good at change. You start a playlist up during a quiet time one day, and as the deep timbre of the artist’s voice reaches your ears, you close your eyes and let the words sink in. You cry, quietly, and not for the first time, find yourself in a seemingly desperate prayer while on your knees.

It’s September, and you’re en route to see a concert again with your friend. You smile as he tells you what it’s like for him to be “in the real world” now, instead of in college. You crack a joke or two before the lights dim, and the artist steps on stage. This venue is smaller than the last one, no seats to portion out personal space from person to person, just a floor—a room full of people whose breaths seem to echo the beat of the music emanating from the instruments being played skillfully before them. The artist pauses, and begins a slow guitar introduction. Your heart leaps into your chest, and for the second time in your life, the lack of personal space is negligible as you close your eyes and enjoy the lyrics, singing quietly along and smiling to yourself.

It’s November, you’re just a few weeks shy of turning twenty-one. You’re on a break at work when you get an unexpected message and your heart sinks. You know you can’t cry at work, you’ve got things to do, so you mind your own business and throw headphones in for the remainder of your shift. As you leave the office and walk to your car, the weight of what you read earlier hits you. You’re confused, upset, and feel more unwanted than you can ever remember having felt before. You step into your car and buckle in before leaning your head back on the seat and breathing deeply through your nose, the nearly-gone scent of coconut quirking your lips into an involuntary smile. You turn on your car radio and begin playing music from one of your playlists. As you pull into a parking spot outside your house, the hesitant guitar plucks hang in the air and you finally let yourself cry for a minute before composing yourself, and walking into your house as if nothing was wrong.

It’s March. You’re on the tail end of what’s become a three-hour commute from your Spring Break trip back to your apartment. You park your car in a garage and smile at the idea of having the place to yourself for the next 24 hours in order to have some introverted recuperation from spending a week in a cabin with 14 of your dear friends. You smile at the memory of the group playing and singing along to worship music that morning as you grab your bags and walk towards your building. You reach the door and as you open it, the music—that song—starts to play. You pause and drop your bags inside your bedroom door and close your eyes, recalling the first time you heard this song. You feel the contentment in your heart, the warmth of the sun, the desire to capture this moment in time and store it in your mind forever. Your friend who introduced you to the song is married now, the friend from the passenger seat nearing his senior year, and you, you’re only 9 months out from graduation. You breathe deeply and let the memories of the song assault you – joyful and melancholic alike – and you close your eyes. This song has changed you, it’s changed with you. The meaning has moved you and shaken you to your core. You’ve learned more about yourself, about others, about God, all from this song. You smile.

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That’s all from one song, and there are plenty more chains of memories like that. It’s a lot, I’m aware.

I’ve always been a pretty sensorially conscious person. As a kid, I was acutely aware of what textures were/weren’t acceptable to me, what smells would make me want to gag, and what sounds were pleasant or unpleasant to hear. Music was no exception. Some songs (even now) I just can’t handle. They make my mind hurt, they don’t sound the way that music should to make me feel something, they sound like just noise to me, not songs… With that sort of particularity and sensitivity to sounds, when people talk about music, there’s an instinctive sensory association with it for me.

The way that people can perform word associations (e.g. when you hear school, you think of: books, teachers, students, learning, campuses, degrees) I’ll sound, scent, and touch associate. I’ll hear a song and can be transported to the first time I heard it, I’ll smell a lotion and be reminded of a childhood toy that had the same fake fruit scent to it, or I’ll be sitting in a room thinking about a specific memory and remember the sun or the wind or the rain from when it occurred. It can be both interesting and frustrating, depending on the circumstance, but either way, it’s the way my brain operates.  

The closest parallel process I can give is like this: Sometimes, I’ll get into either a conversation or a train of thought that ends up in a very different place than where it started, and I’ll try to go back and trace the chain of thoughts that’s gotten me to where I am. In doing so, I envision a literal train that connects one topic to the one before it until I get to the locomotive, which presents me with the topic that started the whole process. I do the same thing with songs, going all the way back from the most recent time I’ve heard it to the very first time I remember it.

It’s quite a trek doing a full song association, especially if it’s one I’ve known for years. Firth of Fifth, for example, has been on an internal soundtrack I’d assume since I was born, given my father’s love for Genesis, while something like Jon Bellion’s Stupid Deep came across my path in January, and would result in a much shorter association of memories.

This song association also plays into (no pun intended) the way I perform songs.

I’ve been playing music since I could walk. I mean it—there are pictures of me with a Pebbles and Bam-Bam style ponytail on top of my head and a xylophone mallet in my hands while a music instructor hugs me around the shoulders. It’s something I’ve grown up with, something that’s always felt quite natural to learn. You can probably imagine that after 16 years of piano playing and 20 other instruments later, I may have picked up some music theory.

In the first few years that I was learning piano, I worked out of technique, theory and artistry books, and once I got around to high school and planned on pursuing music in college, I enrolled in a music theory course and took a more invested interest in the subject. Music theory was fascinating to me, it felt almost like understanding the science behind a lightbulb, or gravity, if that makes any sense. The sounds that I loved so much suddenly had names, compound chords, perfect fourths, inversions… Giving names to these things allowed me to determine what intervals made for what melodies, what chords could go under one note or another, and made all sorts of musical tricks and shortcuts easier to understand. The associations were taught that made understanding music easier for me.

But it hit me last year, that while the musical theory part of my brain functions quite quickly, the performance part goes even faster. If I sit down at a piano with a melody in mind, my fingers will instinctively fly to the proper notes with (usually) little error, if any. Before my mind can tell me that the traditional wedding march begins with a fourth, my fingers have already found the notes and moved on. It’s always been a favored skill of mine, especially when listening to music and attempting to play along on the piano.

It’s weird for me to think about this in detail and to put it into writing. Normally, when I play music, these things just happen. If I sit down at a piano and decide to play Ben Rector, you can almost guarantee that I’m thinking about Fall of 2018, or if I play the Reputation album, Spring of the same year. The memories of those songs are so intertwined with the experiences I had that they can’t be separated, which is kind of cool, but also makes it hard to articulate the way music hits me sometimes. The way I explained it to someone on the phone was kind of like this: “Writing is in one language, and music is another. This post, if all goes according to plan, will be a challenge of me trying to write the intersection of those two languages.” (Can’t confirm that I’ve actually done it, so the jury’s still out on that one).

(this is a REAL picture of me in the middle of music theory analysis in high school, enjoy)

Words and music are both pretty important to me. I’ve always been a big reader too, and have known for a long while that words carry weight, as does music. If I say things poorly, (which I’ve been known to do in the past) I can cause a world of hurt or a breath of fresh air. Music does the same, it can set a tone of joy and hope or of despair and foreboding. Sometimes, even songs that are meant to encourage can bring about the opposite, which is fascinating to me. For example, there’s a song that I heard for the first time in a scenario where I felt wildly uncomfortable, and now every time I hear it, my first thought is always of that day, that moment, and even though I love the song I cringe.

I can’t imagine that I’m the only one who’s experienced that, the almost tangible memory of the first time, or most impactful time you’ve heard a song. If something momentous happens, you remember it. But it’s absolutely fascinating to me. Memories tangled up in music tangled up in the other senses tangled up in emotions, it’s a mess, that’s for sure, but it’s a beautiful one, I think.

I know this post is a bit far off from what I usually write (see: disclaimer at the beginning) but as the idea hit me, I knew I wanted to write about it. Music is neat (catch me in the chapel on campus playing music 4/7 days of the week) and I enjoy getting to talk about how much I enjoy it (because that sentence isn’t a mess lol).

I’d love to hear if you have thoughts on this – music, words, associations like this, my writing, honestly, anything. I’m always happy to hear the responses that people have to what I’ve written.

So let me know if you have thoughts, and as always, thanks for sticking around for the ride.

Signing off,

Amanda