recent tracks:

Music is pretty crazy.

Badly Drawn Boy "Stone on the Water"
Beulah "Emma Blowgun's Last Stand"
Trail of Dead "Source Tags and Codes"
My Morning Jacket "Steam Engine"
Decemberists "California One"

These songs might not be my top five, but they share one thing in common: I hear them and have a physical reaction which could be described as hysterical.* They bring me closer to tears than just about anything else I encounter in day to day life. I wanted to write about why, but I am kind of tired. So I hopped on over to Google, and lo and behold! what should be the first really relevant response to my query but a Carleton prof whose paper I stopped reading after an incorrect use of the term oxymoron. I don't mean to be snotty about that, but due to my tiredness I just kept mulling over the term oxymoron in my head and got distracted. I like the word "mull."

So anyway I think Prof. London says some interesting things, but I can't say for sure. I can say that my reaction is almost certainly partly in response to some properties of the music and partly in response to associations. We all know the story of how, when I went through my frantically knitting furiously depressed phase, I and my compadres listened to Badly Drawn Boy's The Hour of Bewilderbeast AT LEAST once daily for over two months. Wow. Care to hazard a guess what "Stone on the Water" calls to mind? Trail of Dead I think is actually more of a musical response. I can't pin "Source Tags and Codes" to anything specific, but the song builds fantastically to an exploding musical climax--the lyrics? "I don't know what in this world is trying to save me / but I can feel its hand and it's guiding me..." Come to think of it, I was listening to the album Source Tags and Codes almost exclusively as I emerged from depression. Seems kind of fitting. "Emma Blowgun" = Rome. Rome might just have had some tiny influence on my life. "Steam Engine" is a "beginning to date Summer" song to me, and "California One" calls to mind our future. "Take a long drive with me," says Colin Meloy. Pretty crazy--but anyway my point is why music? Why not a book or a painting or anything else? What is it about sound that ties it to emotion? Books can climax and paintings can emote, but somehow music seems most complete. If Summer weren't asleep I'd be picking her brain for information on this stuff right now.

It's not just emotional memories, either. "This Is a Call," the first song off of the first Foo Fighters album? Wrestling practice in seventh grade. "February Stars," off The Colour and the Shape? Lying on my back looking (appropriately enough) at the sky on the boat in the Chesapeake. Here're some more: "Back Porch" by the Presidents of the United States of America (driving in to school with Alex, senior year of high school) and "No Rain" by Blind Melon (playing Myst at the end of computer class in early middle school, shockingly enough!), of course "Rain on Tin" (Philly with my phather), that crazy Polyphonic Spree song about the trees wanting to grow (concertgoing with both parentals), "Du Hast" by Rammstein (my arm in a sling hanging out with JV soccer before going to watch football practice), "The Magic Number" by De La Soul (Sea Isle City harassing Alex), "Mambo Number 5" by Lou Bega (driving with Dan and his brother and cousin on a particularly bizarre weekend evening), anything from the Rudy score (locker room before high school football games), "Don't Speak" by No Doubt (stuck in the very back seat of a crowded van in the to-school carpool), "Tom's Diner" by Suzanne Vega (car rides with my mother AND supercool middle school me knowing all the words and reciting them for people) and perhaps most hilariously "Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana (the car with my father and brother, the former drumming on the steering wheel and the latter shouting "THE POTATOS!!! alongside Kurt's call of "entertain us!"). Wait a minute, these moments all seem somehow significant. To me at least. And there are a gazillion more, with a gazillion more songs. Pretty crazy, no?

So anyway my overall question is kind of a mush of interrelated questions. Does a song have to have some special property to forge this sort of association? Like for example is it even possible to form an emotional bond with any of the kind of musically competant mediocrities that make up the current complexion of mainstream radio? Or does there have to be something more there? And let's take "No Rain" with its obvious heroin-addict ennui. First--the ennui is clear and I feel it from listening to the song. How much of an emotional reaction does this elicit on its own, and how much does my association of the song with my middle school experience (middle school = heroin funk? a little much, I know. Apologies.) bear on the situation? It's about 2 now--should I go to bed? The answer to the last question I know, and I know I know, to borrow terminology from advanced logic.

Goodnight. More on happenings someday in the future. For now, ruminate on music. I decree it shall be so. I had something else to say but I forget so music music music.

*Side note: I use the term hysterical specifically because of its etymology. While I don't have a uterus, the idea of an organ twisting around inside of me is appropriate.