The power of music

I find it funny how much emotion plays a role in how you perceive or experience certain things, and how that can change over time. This pertains specifically to music, at least in this moment for me.

I mentioned a TOOL song in something I wrote earlier, and I was inspired to listen to the entire album. I originally got this album when I was 15, and would listen to it over and over on my cheap Walkman knockoff with crap headphones. First and foremost, I’d just like to say that am thrilled that the portable listening experience is so improved from that time. Aside from that, it baffles me how the way you think of a song, or what it means to you, or how you feel listening to it can change over the years, and how life experiences can make you realize that what the song meant to you at that time is probably not what the artist intended, and certainly not at all what it means to you 20+ years later. It’s amazing how the lenses of emotion can color things in such different ways. That said, none of that matters because you had an emotional experience, evolving or not, and I believe that is the goal of any musician.

For example, the album Aenima. I have said before that this album saved my life a number of times, and I absolutely believe that. But, listening to it now is such a different experience. The song “Eulogy” has a great intro. Building layers of sound that start off crisp and light, becoming more and more complex, adding deeper tones gradually until it crashes into a rumbling bass and drum line that just picks you up and carries you off, complexities still lingering underneath. I probably listened to the first two minutes and 40 seconds of that song over and over hundreds of times when I first got the album, just to hear and understand all those different sounds. The acoustical intricacies of that song just called to me.

I think the reason those details resonated with me is because of my complex and chaotic emotional state at that time. The title of the song, and my clear obsession with it and the rest of the album caused some… tension. And rampant miscommunication. A friend of mine destroyed three different copies of the album because he thought that it was causing me to feel a certain way. But in reality, it was giving me something else to focus on, something that I could identify with so I didn’t feel quite so alone, and something that gave form to emotions that I couldn’t even put into words.

That is the power of music.