Besides a brief and terrible dalliance with the piano when I was younger, I've only ever been a listener of music --and not a particularly good one at that. I've been told on numerous occasions that I am "the most tone deaf person I know." It's nothing I'm embarrassed of; I came to the conclusion long ago that music was not my forte and never would be just like art or physical activity doesn't gel with some people.
That is not to say that I don't like music. Like most people, I enjoy music. When I run, I listen to poppy 90's hits and angry chick rock; Most Friday nights you can find me dancing somewhere or another to the current club mixes and Top 40 hits: Katy Perry and Akon and Cascada. If you want to make me feel wistful for my all but lost childhood just hum to me any song from Aladdin or Mulan and I guarantee I'll join you enthusiastically in song, albeit in an off key manner.
Music is inescapable in our daily lives. Only when I sleep can I arguably say that music is truly silenced. And who knows, perhaps records spin on repeat in my slumbering mind unbeknownst to me. This is a ubiquity that I am sadly reminded of every time I am in my room attempting to study, only to have my focus broken by the Hebrew hymns my Jewish roommate loves to play. So I guess my relationship with music is that I find it unapproachable in the sense that its curlicue notes and esoteric motifs are utterly beyond my ken, and yet by virtue of its omnipresence in my life, it's an alien entity I've learned to coexist with.
If I were asked to articulate just how exactly music permeates my life, I think I would refer mostly to its strange properties of memory. Songs can be repositories or at least aids to a person's memory. Many of my memories concerning family road trips I took when I was younger have snippets of songs playing in the backdrop. When I listen to Copeland's cover of "Every Breath You Take" by the police, the visceral tremor of each lyric, how the phrase "oh can't you see, that you belong to me..." draws out in haunting fermata in my mind, plays back to me a memory slide show of the Grand Tetons all snow capped and jagged rising up out of the Wyoming flatness. My impression of that moment, the desolation I perceived from the car window as the world slid by so smoothly outside blends into my feelings about the song. They exist intertwined in my consciousness and I don't think I could nor want to dissociate the two. The music enriches my memory and vice versa, and now whenever I think about great swaths of gray plain or the crenelated spine of the Rockies, I think also about Copeland and the Police and how it felt to be in a car, listening to my brother's Ipod nano as he snored in the seat beside me.
Experiences like this pepper any life. There's one snippet of "Kids" by MGMT that I will always associate with the laundry room raves my friends and I would have the summer I spent at Governor's School in the sun baked ghost town of Martin, West Tennessee. Play "Daylight" by Matt and Kim for me and not only will I smile, but my eyes will get that detached, glassy look and you know that I will be thinking of Andrew, and how we would drive around town aimlessly to that song on nights we didn't feel like doing homework, just talking about school and life. Then there's "Recessional" by Vienna Teng, which I hear sidling through my mind every time I see snow because it was the song I was listening to that time I was walking Airik in the woods near my house and before I knew it, the first and only snow of that year was falling in soft white waves onto my face.
The thing is, most of these memories I feel like are more about the images and the tactile sensations then the music. "Every Breath You Take" is an important addendum to my memory of that car drive from Colorado to Yellowstone, but what I remember even more vividly is the visual impact of the Mountains materializing in the distance and the cool compress of glass against my forehead as I stared at their approach, utterly transfixed. So in a way, music seems to be only tangentially related to my memories; the soundtrack of my life has no inherent value of its own beyond the fact that it allows me to conjure up my memory of a moment more readily.
If there's one memory, or perhaps almost-memory, of mine in which music is an integral part of the recollection rather than just a framing device, it would be my memory of an event that occurred in my life on Friday the 13th my freshman year of high school. Sometimes a song has such eerie symbolism within a memory that it's hard to dismiss as a instance of chance. The song in question here is "Chasing Cars" by Snow Patrol and the instance I'm remembering is a car crash that nearly took my life. My memory of the crash itself is spotty at best, my mind has blocked out much of what happened. I remember no crunching metal or the flash of car lights. I can't envision in my head the moment of impact, the instance where my face slammed into the head rest in front of me, the bloody intrusion of my teeth into my lower nasal cavity. These things all happened, and yet I don't remember how or when. What I do remember with almost vicious clarity is the sound of the radio playing right before Jesse's mom slammed on the brakes. I was singing along, my mouth luxuriantly open, eyes half-closed.
"If I lay here... If I just lay here. Would you lie with me and just forget the world."
And then nothing.
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