Listening is a complete experience
Sometimes we create, sometimes we devour
My dad is a professional musician. Now 75, he describes how music is the only thing he’s done — besides a two month stint working in a warehouse when he was a teenager.
Music is in his bones and it’s who he is. Every morning, he gets up and practices, starting by playing Bach on his guitar. If music is playing in a restaurant, no matter how quietly, it pulls his focus and he struggles to hear the conversation he’s in. I’ve seen him itch to touch an instrument when traveling, befriending buskers in order to get his fix.
I grew up in a musical house. When I was a child, friends of my parents would say to me, “when you get older, you’ll realize how lucky you are”. Lucky to have been exposed to jazz and classical music and sounds from around the world at such a young age, they meant. And they were right. I was lucky. I am lucky.
Music is in me, too. Sometimes I think it’s the biggest part of me, what I feel most completely, most deeply. When I feel like I’m losing myself, song brings me back. Some of the most profound connections I’ve had with other people have involved hearing the same tiny part of the same song in the same way — just knowing they’re experiencing what I’m experiencing.
I’ve collected music obsessively since I was a kid, burning CD after CD when that was a thing, now with about 25,000 “liked songs” saved on a streaming app. I remember being 15 and crying on a school trip when I found a record I’d been waiting for in a shop in Europe, the album not yet having been released in North America. Every fall, I make a pilgrimage to Nashville to hear my favourite singer perform. To sit in my favourite singer songwriter bar and to listen.
And yet I struggle to convey this when my dad’s friends, or the artists he’s working with, or members of the audience, ask me now about my experience with music. They tend to ask: “so do you play an instrument, too?”
“No,” I’ll say, somewhat apologetically, “but I love music, too.”
This never seems to be enough. “Wow,” they might say, “so it didn’t carry over to you.” It seems impossible to express the extent to which it did. Outside of writing this essay, the word I turn to for succinct explanation is “listener”. I am a listener. I try to use the word boldly.
I want that word to convey the depth it holds, or can hold. Just as someone might take piano lessons here and there while for another the piano saves their life. Listening can be a complete, a meaningful, a rich, and an artistic experience. It is an art, and an act, all its own, to receive. To appreciate, to devour.
Of course, there have been moments when I’ve wanted to play an instrument. I still do hope to learn one someday. Maybe several — I have daydreamed not only about the guitar and the piano but also about the banjo and the oud. Certainly, a different kind of appreciation, a different kind of magic, would come from this.
But for now, I listen to music. Sometimes I listen to music like my life depends on it. Often I think that it does.
Anyways, I made you a playlist (or can we just go ahead and call it a mixtape?) of some of the songs that hold the most magic for me, the ones that are really in my bones. I recommend lying down right on the floor, perhaps with a glass of red wine, and just listening.
PS talk to me about listening and music and magic and art in the comments! <3
Love, Ellie