Every year I get less jaded about my musical tastes. I love listening to music and lyrics that are outside my own experience. I have this physical sensation of my brain and solar plexus twisting in this new way. It’s the reason why I love the monthly playlist of Major Matt, himself a great songwriter. And because it’s always accompanied by a blog post, I happen to know he also appreciates music that’s outside his usual listening comfort zone.
Not sure whether it’s a coincidence, but I’ve started writing like this, too. When a song emerges, and I can’t define the genre or if I even like it, I just go with it. My painter friend Jodi reminds us in her social media posts that creativity has it’s own inertia, and we need to let it flow free from self judgement.
Aside from music that stretches us, there are those songs that hit the nail on the head. They give words to what we already know, sounds to what we already feel, drawing it out, confirming and validating us. They’re the songs that we blast 20 years after we first hear them, the ones we sing at the top of our lungs. Or the ones we lean into,, retreat, zone out. When I’m lucky, like really really lucky, I can write one of those. Maybe only two people in the world will ever hear it. Of those, neither may like it, but it’s there for me. It fossilizes something I once experienced, then like a scent makes me re-live a past scene. Often, a completely new experience has me recall that old song. A soundtrack to my life recirculated.
I started “Rearranged” a couple of decades ago at the tail end of a brief period in my life where I loved mind altering substances. I wish I could say I was on a journey to elevate my consciousness, or expand my being. But nah, i was just drawn to stuff that made the music sound better. And stuff that drew me out of my introverted shyness. It was a short phase, for awhile a super sweet part of my life. Thankfully, as it turned out, I wasn’t prone to getting addicted to anything (other than nicotine!) Still, I could feel my essence morphing slowly until all of the sudden I didn’t recognize myself anymore. It took an uncharacteristically long time to finish Rearranged. So long, in fact, that the person I was when I finished the song was completely different from the person I was when I started it. And it started about change in the first place. On the surface, it’s so cliche. Yeah, inside out. Upside down. I’ve heard it a million times over. But I couldn’t get stuck on cliche phobia, because it was the only way I could describe this kaleidoscope of identities. This was released about three years ago, one of my very first home studio self-productions. A soundtrack to my life recirculated.