“When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have.”
-Edgar Watson Howe
“One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain.”
-Bob Marley
I'm not a big fan of the Bob Marley quotation above. It's possibly the most over-used saying to describe what music can do to a person. I understand what Bob was getting at, and generally agree with the sentiment. It just doesn't say enough.
To me, music is one of the greatest forces one earth when it comes to invoking emotions. It can galvanize moods, cause smiles or tears, and generally just plug into the emotional center of our brain in a way that few things can. Music can change people. I realize many aren't as sensitive to these aesthetics as I am, but as I look back on my 26 years, I notice how many of my most-cherished memories are connected with music in some way.
Music can be devastating.
I'm not a cryer. Crying is something I did as a child and have largely forgotten how to do since. That being said, certain things can trigger such feeling in me.
When I was 19, a girl I had known in passing died suddenly of complications resulting from cystic fibrosis. Not even her closest friends knew she had this condition, and I reflected on the last few parties I had seen her at, where the air was smoky, and there she was, probably miserable, but not showing it in the slightest because she just wanted to live a normal life. I was told by some of her closer friends that she would hide the breathing machines when people went to her house so no one would know. She just wanted to be a normal woman on the cusp of adulthood. She was about two months younger than me, and this particular aspect of her death is what stung me the most—I had found so little of what I sought at that point in my life, and the thought that someone who had had less time could be gone was overwhelming. I spent half of her funeral in the bathroom trying to put myself together. I wonder now how many tears have been shed in private in that particular bathroom. Many, I'm sure.
Driving back from her funeral, I heard this. It's not something I listen to often anymore, but anytime it comes up on my music library's shuffle I pause for a moment and remember what that season felt like. Even though I hadn't been particularly close to her, it was weeks before I didn't think of her on an almost constant basis. There was something about her that shined. She's been gone for slightly more than seven years now, but I still think about her, and she'll always be connected with certain music for me.
Music can save your mind.
On June 29th, 2008. I stood in a full auditorium in Knoxville, TN with tears streaming down my face. Tom Waits, on the cusp of his 60s, was sitting in front of his piano and playing a song he had written ten years before I was born. Anyone close to me knows how much I love Tom, it borders on a religion. I'm fond of saying things like “I learned more from him than I did from my father” (which is true) and the best memories I have in my life are closely associated with my with discovery and appreciation of his music. I know a lot of people can't stand him, but any guy who Bob Dylan said was “the best songwriter of his generation” has to have some merit right? I had gone to the concert expecting to be disappointed, Tom was getting on in years, hadn't toured in almost a decade and I expected the show would foremost make me lament not being born earlier.
I couldn't have been more wrong; there are reasons some musicians are considered legendary. Tom put on an A++ show, played for about two hours, and had the entire crowd completely absorbed in what he was doing (I wasn't the only one showing tears). He told jokes. He made us laugh. He made us dance. It was a roller coaster. Before one song, he encouraged us to sing along if we knew the words. He stopped us after about 15 seconds saying that maybe we knew the words, but we'd obviously never looked at the sheet music. He was the consummate maestro. I will never forget that feeling. It was like all that is good in life was in that room. Much of relaying this experience remains ineffable, but of all I've lived through, that concert remains one of the greatest experiences I've ever had. It trumps many achievements, romances, and adventures. So strongly were my ears touched.
Music can create camaraderie.
The summer of 2006 was very hard for me. My life had been upturned and I was largely having to rebuild so much which had been previously undisturbed. I met a young woman through a friend who loved classic rock. I loved classic rock. Not only did we love classic rock, but we loved drinking beer and shooting pool. Those are three things you can build a friendship on. While nothing romantic materialized, we became very close friends in a short amount of time. We became partners in crime that summer, meeting several times a week, sometimes with others, sometimes just the two of us. We'd shoot pool and drink ourselves silly until last call (oh the things you can do when you're 22), then we'd go back to my apartment and stay up all night listening to classic rock albums in the dark. Carol King. Jim Croce. James Taylor. The Beatles (meh). Elton John. Tom Petty. Numerous other favorites I can't recall.
She was taken out of my life by circumstance shortly after that summer, but I was always grateful for those nights we spent, singing softly or just sitting in silence, brought to communion with each other through simple, heart-felt, adoration of the vibrations in the air. That was therapy. While we're not actively friends today, we retain a loose contact (read: Facebook) and occasionally send each other a line or two from a song we recall. Appreciating the memory, I suppose.
That's probably enough reminiscing. Time to get on to what actually inspired me to write this.
Yesterday I was listening to a podcast. The podcast itself has nothing to do with music, in fact it's about sports (gasp! Who likes sports??). During a break in the show, this song played. Something about it really struck me. I Googled some of the lyrics and found out the band was Mumford and Sons. I'd heard of them before, but didn't actively take to what I had heard previously. Today I purchased their album Sigh No More and experienced something I haven't in a really long time: striking gold.
Some albums are great, all-around works, you find them and believe they will remain an important voice in your life for years to come(Neutral Milk Hotel – In The Aeroplane Over the Sea), some albums lure you in with some great songs, but there is no developed feeling which threads through the entire record, and the album ultimately falls flat (Leonard Cohen – New Skin For The Old Ceremony) and some albums are messes which somehow work (The Who - Quadrophenia). Some albums, you listen to them once, they lie dormant in your CD case or on your playlist awhile, then something happens in your life that makes this particular album the exact thing you need until you get through whatever it is (The Mountain Goats – The Sunset Tree). Some albums just suck (anything by U2). Albums take up residence in our mp3 players and our heads for varying amounts of time, but they all leave a little bit of their residue behind.
Mumford and Sons' Sigh No More is the first truly touching album I've stumbled upon in quite some time. Themes such as love (that real, hard-fought love that takes from you but ultimately gives back so much more than it took), spirituality, hardship, sacrifice, salvation and resilience in spite of such permeate the entire album. The thing is, this is done with a true sense of dignity and maturity, two things often missing from music which focuses on themes such as these. Marcus Mumford's voice takes on these issues with true believability—he's not spouting clichés and rhetoric in an effort to plug into a popular market—he's telling stories in a way which make you believe he feels every word and associates an actual memory with each song. The band waltzes through twelve tracks of melodic modern-folk, each track is unique, but unified by theme and voice. Whether Mumford is speaking of romance, God or an enemy, he brings it all back together by leaving a piece of himself in each track. It's a startling orchestration. There is something very genuine about this album. While the record deals with many hard subjects, there is an overlaying tone of struggle and triumph despite difficulty, pain or past failure. It's a remarkable accomplishment and I can't readily equate it with any other album I own. While it's not quite perfect, it's nearly so.
Suffering is a complicated thing. There's a big difference between wallowing in your troubles and lamenting them. One denotes a pause in progression, the other, sinking stagnation.
I'm not going to quote lyrics at you because I think that's one of the stupidest practices found in music criticism today. It seems like when your typical Rolling Stone album reviewer listens to an album 1.5 times and attempts to write a review they just resort to a brief quotation of lyrics, divorced from the context of the song, and make a few stumbling, cursory conclusions about the album as a whole. Fuck Rolling Stone. Suffice to say, Mumford is able to tackle hard, emotional subjects with dignity. This is not easy to do. The absence of dignity has long dissuaded me from certain popular music. Nothing turns me off to music more than some 30-something fake whining on about teenage romance and how much pain he's in to the backdrop of three-chord pop rock. It's such a farce, and it disgusts me that this is what is passing for an emotionally-made record these days. It taps into an uncertainty widely felt by younger generations these days and creates a caricaturization of actual feeling. It's a joke which celebrates imitation of real feeling.
I don't expect Sigh No More to resonate with everyone as it has with me; we all respond to different aesthetics, if one other person finds something that lifts them in it, that makes all these words worth it.
I purchased the album via electronic download. The top comment in the customer reviews section simply read “this album saved me from suicide.” While that may very well be an exaggeration, after listening to the record and already being intimately familiar with music's power to heal broken spirits, I'm inclined believe it might not be. I don't know where I'd be without music, and without the affinity I have for it, but I'd be far less than I am today.
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