I have been listening to music almost nonstop for the past two days! A weekend full of music.
And not just casually. Like, not pleasant humming in the background while I go about my life. I mean listening listening. Headphones on. Volume up. Songs on repeat because apparently five times isn’t enough when some particular chord change, drum beat, guitar line, or voice has found its way into that mysterious place inside me that doesn’t speak in words.
This weekend, it happens to be mostly Turnstile: NEVER ENOUGH: Versions and GLOW ON; also Evanescence’s Fallen and Kalandra’s 2014 song, “Rest Your Soul,” which I just discovered.
Turnstile has quickly become my favorite band. I’m in love with them. There’s something about the energy in their music and performances that feels like fire, aliveness, vibrancy. And they’re just fun as hell. But underneath all that energy is music that hits me emotionally, too. Their lyrics can be vulnerable, aching, even existential, wrapped inside this amazing musicality and explosive physical energy. Somehow, they make me want to move and feel everything at the same time.
It’s so weird, but something about music feels different to me.
Or maybe I feel different.
Sound seems to be hitting deeper than usual, stirring something restless and alive inside. I’ve found myself missing having a piano nearby.
It’s like I don’t want to merely consume music. I want to enter into it. Sit at the keyboard, hunt for the chords, discover the voicings, sing against them, make the song physical through my hands.
And, I’m longing to connect with other music people, someone I can say, “Hey, listen to what happens right here,” and they immediately understand why those four seconds matter. Someone who wants to go hear a band, trade songs, sit around figuring out chords, argue affectionately about a bridge, discover some obscure artist at 11:30 at night.
The whole experience of being met inside something that matters so enormously, well, at least to me.
And underneath all of this is another feeling, one considerably less welcome.
Though music is making me feel intensely alive, that aliveness is simultaneously reminding me that time is passing. So damn quickly.
I watch musicians I love performing with astonishing physicality and abandon. I see photographs and videos filled with beautiful young faces. I scroll through social media, where youth appears to be everywhere, endlessly preserved in perfect lighting. And I feel that pang: I don’t get to be young anymore.
God, I fucking hate that!
But here’s the strange part.
At precisely the moment I am grieving my youth, I’m also feeling extraordinarily alive.
I want to hear more music. I want to make music. I want to go to concerts. I want a piano beneath my hands again. I want to find my way back to my guitar. I want to find other people who understand why a song can matter so much that you need to hear it again immediately after it ends.
It appears that getting older and becoming more alive are somehow happening at the same time, my love and passion for music, intensifying. What an almost cruel and unfamiliar paradox.
So I’m listening harder. I’m working with sound professionally. I’m thinking about making music again and teaching piano. I’m craving people with whom I can share it. There’s certainly something bigger than me banging at the door asking for more life.
For so many years, I sacrificed music, art, creativity to please others, living a life that became increasingly contained. I lost the essence of who I was. I cannot get those years back. Of course, I was also mothering, and that was an important and crucial part of my life. In many ways, it was the thing that kept me alive.
Perhaps that’s where the cruel and unfamiliar paradox lives. I’m finally reclaiming parts of myself that I shuttered away, while becoming increasingly aware that time is not infinite.
I want the remaining decades of my life to contain the things that make me feel unmistakably alive.
And music seems to be shouting that message particularly loudly right now.
What can I do but listen?
And go for it…
“Birds” by Turnstile 🫶🤘🙌 🎶
“Rest Your Soul” by Kalandra – Such powerful lyrics
Photo by Evgeniy Smersh on Unsplash
