Singular Songs

There are songs that we share for any number of reasons. The song you mention to show off how culturally literate you are. The song you use to demonstrate you care enough about your friends to know what they like. The songs you use to establish street cred. The songs you use as a reason to talk to the cute girl.

This isn’t about those songs.

There are songs we don’t share out of shame. I recently made the joke that my Grooveshark library has a playlist called Shame, leading to there always being a tab up on my computer entitled “My Shame”. I can identify Ke$ha’s “Blow” in under 10 seconds (it’s been tested). I know the words to Miley Cyrus songs (though only when drunk it seems). In general though, we protect the image we project by hiding those guilty pleasures indulgences.

This isn’t about those songs.

This is about the other songs, the ones that we cannot share. The ones that exist, for a single, sparkling moment in time, as a reflection and crystallization of all we are. The ones that hit us in places that, until we heard them, we did not know even existed. These are the songs that give music its power and leave us, like junkies, always scrounging, and hoping and waiting for that next score.

As I came out of class today, I put on my headphones and pressed play. The current track ended and the next track on an album I had just bought started. It took an effort of will to not just sit down in the sun and start weeping. I had inadvertently stumbled onto something I have only encountered a handful of times: the perfect song.

Now, before the musicologist raise their objections, let me say that by no means was it perfect as a song. The structure, content and moving pieces were all, I’m sure, flawed or suboptimal in some respect. But that didn’t matter. For that brief moment in time, the song was perfect for me. It was the brilliant mirror held up to my soul. It was the echo that proves you actually shouted. My current sadness was there. My hope for tomorrow was there. Everything I could want in a song, right then, was there.

Leave it to a cynic like me, but one of the saddest parts of finding such a song is knowing that, in time, it won’t mean the same thing to you that it does right then. You move on. You change. You grow and fuck up in new and spectacular ways. Listening to formerly perfect songs, you realize how much they reflect you as you were at that moment. I think back on the songs that had such emotional impacts on me, and my reaction is despair (“What was I thinking?”), condescension (“I can’t believe that I thought this was so meaningful!”), sadness (“Is this really what I felt like?”) or something similarly dismissive. The power of these songs is inextricably linked to their ephemeral nature. They are who we are, for a moment in time and nothing more. Trying to recapture their meaning is like using salt that has lost its savor or remembering a dream after you’ve awakened. It’s not the same and trying to make it be just reinforces how much is subtly different.

This is why we can’t share these songs. They are who we are. They reflect everything we hope, fear, dream, and despair of in a single, perfect moment. Anyone else, when they listen, will hear the musical imperfections, the lyrical idiocies, and the oh too long intro. What they miss is the context, the “us” of that moment. I could share this song with you, tell you the title, give you a link to amazon to go and buy it (since I do not know any musical pirates). But it wouldn’t be the same song for you. Even knowing me, you cannot know me well enough to be able to share this experience.

But maybe this is where my self-imposed blinders come in. I’ve changed a lot about myself this last year. I can truthfully say that. It might not be obvious to everyone, but I am a radically different person than I was. However, still untouched, that black box in the center of my soul, is my secrecy. That I hold my real thoughts close is well known. That I am deceptive, opaque or misleading when it preserves my privacy is similarly documented. Maybe this belief that people are mutually incomprehensible is misplaced. Maybe the only limitation in sharing these songs, is our fear of vulnerability. Maybe I’m afraid of what could happen if I give someone what is, essentially, the blueprint to my soul.

Maybe I have a song to share.

First!

I am actually a bit surprised that I’m sitting here and writing on a blog.  Me.  A blog!  Whatever is the world coming to?

It took me a few moments of quiet contemplation to realize the chain of events that had brought us to this surprising outcome.  First, we have the friends.  The people whose lively social antics and implied peer pressure make the idea of jumping in oh-so exciting.  Second, we have the call to arms (as Campbell would say).  Recently, a colleague/hero/life mentor told me that my hang up on my dissertation proposal could be solved by just writing.  The first day I took her advice, I managed to get down 20 (pretty) coherent pages of material in a couple hours.  Since then, I’ve been quite sold on the whole “writing to think” method, though sadly derelict in continuing.  Turning this same wisdom on my personal life and growth, I realized that maybe writing out my thoughts and demons would help me to better challenge myself.

In that vein, I present the following thoughts, musings and cogitations.  While I am doing this for myself, I guess there’s value in publicity, the catharsis of the public confession and all.