Music Blog

Many of my greatest listening sessions have taken place behind the steering wheel. Strapped in and sitting still as the world outside slips by, I have many times become engulfed by the way music sounds when confined closely around my body to thump against the inside of my rib cage and mimic my soul as though the music were more familiar with the way it surges and stirs than I. And I have become so immersed in the resonating acoustics traveling inside the car that I have begun to imagine the music was designed specifically to soundtrack my surroundings, be they bleak or beautiful. As leafless trees fly by and painted lines fly by and low hanging clouds fly by, I begin to feel that the music is part of every detail I move through. And even while the music pulls me outside of the world, it seems also to make the world I move through somehow more grand, as though I were spreading my wings and scooping up its meaning all at once. Inside the confines of a fast moving car with the warm uninterrupted sounds of music touching places far below my skin, I forget to care for where I am headed; I often even forget that I am in motion.   

I find it odd that inside the car, inside one of technology’s most significant innovations, is where I feel free to lose myself in sound, as though racing through time, and at the same time feeling apart from it, is where I feel most alive, straddling a place between here and nowhere. And stranger that while I shoot through space at an unnatural speed, I pause long enough to listen, to let the music enrapture me, and think not of the mechanics that made the music and the movement possible, but rather feel grateful for the racing in my heart.

Why then do I worry so much of technology and of what it might steal away? Nearly all of my musical experiences would be impossible without it. I have many times sunk deeply into a plush arm chair under the power of headphones and many times I have fallen under a spell before a stage decorated by amplifiers and microphones and many more times I have credited great music for the endurance of long travels on desolate highways whose scenery seems only to habitually repeat itself. I suppose then that it is not the technology itself I fear but instead the culture that it breeds. Every step forward in technology lets commercialization dig its claws deeper into our beings. And as marketing and consumption become evermore pervasive, our value of music as purely music diminishes, as though a great hazy cloud of noise were descending upon us and, from it, no clear pitch could be drawn. The business of technology bombards us with potential, at the same time blocking out the only light that would truly let us reach it; the only light that can warm the most hidden crevices deep within.   

I cherish my uninterrupted experiences with music and reflect on them as though they were dissipating before my eyes, unraveling into faded memories that are, like my favorite childhood moments, never to be relived. I envision growing into a modernized over-saturated life where I no longer feel I have the will to sit gracefully and attentively with music, allowing it to pulse through my veins and expand them with an urge to overflow, for to remain contained might mean missing out. I picture myself and I picture millions of others using technology, depending on technology, succumbing to the weight of every new trick and toy it markets, until it is the act of regularly engaging with the machine, not the art it purports to share, that becomes the focus, as when one emphasizes the hard surface of matters rather than what lies softly below.