She Can’t Live Without Music
Music has had an unparalleled influence on me throughout my life. Since I was a baby, it’s held me, rocked me to sleep, woken me up. It’s taken me out of my head, but also has allowed me to dive deep into my thoughts.
Music takes us places, but also has the power to transform the current space we’re in. It transcends reality, but also hits us with it so hard. It can take a blank room and fill it with color. It can take a dark night sky and fill it with stars.
Music is incredible. Always has been for me.
I used to fall asleep to lullabies, listening to them on an old boom box on my nightstand. That is, until I annoyed my mom and dad so much asking for more music every hour of the night that they took the boom box out of my bedroom.
My taste in music was first influenced by my parents. Growing up, they would play Shania Twain, Rascal Flatts, James Taylor, Elton John, Tim McGraw, The Beatles, the Bee Gees, Tom Petty, and, of course, the Rolling Stones. My sister and I would always get in the car and ask for music. We’d both belt our favorite songs, smiling and laughing in the backseat at my mom’s silly dance moves. A lot of my fondest memories of childhood were in the car singing with my mom and dad.
I used to sing all the time. Still do, but not nearly as much as I want to.
I’d dress up in my mom’s scarves and hats and pretend I was Shania Twain or Hannah Montana and do concerts for my family. I used to sing my own dance songs when I practiced ballet and tap. I started playing the clarinet at age 10 and the piano at 14. I performed in musicals up until college. I took music theory in high school (which was hell by the way). I almost attended a conservatory for musical theatre, which would have sent me on such a different life path. Sometimes thinking about what might have been perplexes me.
It’s hard to describe the feeling I experience when I hear music and lyrics that speak to me. Most of my favorite songs are either insanely uplifting or bittersweet and sad.
They technically make me feel emotional, but what I feel, really, is love: a great outpouring of it. A deep connection with all the other souls in the world who know the sorrow or joy the music is expressing. I feel awe at the musician’s ability to transform pain into beauty. It feels like my heart opens, literally.
Like, my chest literally expands with emotion whenever I’m particularly moved by a song.
It makes me feel less alone. Makes me feel as though a bridge has been built between isolation and connection. That I’m not the only one.
You know when you hear a song, and it seems to voice EXACTLY how you’re feeling? Yea, it’s scary.
Or when you hear a certain chord progression, and it stirs something in your stomach? You’re not imagining it.
Each time this happens, I feel changed slightly. If you define transcendence as a moment in which yourself fades away and you feel connected to everything, these musically sweet moments are the closest I’ve ever come to experiencing it.
Music transcends reality. But it also finds a way to handcuff us to it.
It’s incredible.
Music also allows me to connect with the people I love in a way that words just don’t. My sister and I share the same taste in music. My best friends and I cry over certain songs that bring us back to our college days, blanketed in nostalgia. We scream Avril Lavigne songs that we used to use for karaoke in my 8-year-old lime green bedroom with my neighbors on a Saturday night.
Certain melodies can immediately take me back to romantic relationships I’ve been in. Which sucks sometimes. I can’t listen to certain songs anymore because of how connected they were to my feelings for that person.
Do you ever wonder why people in relationships have a “song”? Why getting married usually comes along with choosing one to have their “first dance” to? Why we play music to calm down, to hype us up? Why pregnant mothers play music specifically for their unborn child to listen to for brain stimulation?
It’s hard to put into words, I know.
But music gives us an outlet to communicate in ways we can’t otherwise. Sometimes if I can’t express how I’m feeling, I can find it in a song. It’s truly remarkable how music is like another language, but also a universal one.
There is nothing better than finding a new song you love and listening to it until you’re sick of it. Than listening to an old song that you forgot you know all the words to. Than singing your heart out to a breakup song that rings WAY TOO TRUE. Than dancing to a beat that makes you feel ALIVE.
It unites people. Ever been in the crowd at a music festival or in the pit of a show? Then you’ve felt it.
Music is food for the soul. It’s the universal language of love, of sorrow, of mourning.
It’s pockets of life expressed in 3-4 minutes. Lyricists and singers are true artists. True life changers.
I would mention some of my favorite songs, but I just can’t choose. I’m a girl who loves many genres and artists.
But, in honor of one of my favorite bands, the 1975, coming out with a new album today, I thought I’d honor music in its fullness in this blog today.
One of their new songs is called Human Too. Their record is about empathy. One of the loves of my life, and creative genius, Matty Healy, says, “This is me empathizing with my own naivety when it comes to love, empathizing with incels, empathizing with 17-year-olds, empathizing with people who are just human. You know that I’m human, I know that you’re human. Let’s start from there rather than this “standard of perfection”. I feel like a lot of young people are setting these moral, political, social standards that they’re never going to be able to live up to. Which is only going to lead them down this road of disappointment and reflection on being a flawed human.”
Instead of meeting themselves right where they are. Music does give us an opportunity to empathize. It helps us to connect to our humanness.
I think that’s the best fucking part.
Listen to your favorite songs today. Ask your friends to send you songs that remind them of you. Honor the emotions music brings you.
Talk soon,
Hannah
