The sound of the sound of music

Music is very important to me.

No, revise that, music is utterly important to me. It is my drug of choice, my addiction. I need it constantly running in the background or the world feels empty and colourless. When I'm not near a source of music then I hear it in my head, hum it under my breath, sing to myself without even realising I'm doing it. Often people comment that I seem very happy when they hear this (normally at work when they couldn't be further from the truth) and I find it odd that the important factor is that I am singing, not what I am singing.

You know what is so amazingly cool about music? It's everywhere. In the measure of someone talking, the rhythm as you walk down the road, the whispering of the trees, the hissing of the surf on shingle, the chirping and buzzing of insects on a still summers day. It lives inside us, coiled round the best parts of us and the worst, helping us hope and dream and laugh and cry and rage and hurt and hate, flows in between the cracks of these emotions and opens them up so we can understand ourselves in a deeper way.

Personally it has been a pool of hope in a dry, bitter land. A place to plunge into and wash clean of all the uncertainty and let out the emotions I have bottled up to protect myself. I've hidden between the bars of Fleetwood Mac when I've felt low, used Peter Gabriel to cry when I've needed to and couldn't, used Beethoven’s wings when I couldn't fly myself, got revved up for a night out on Smashing Pumpkins and sang Agadoo to get people to go away. I've found a release for pain in Saint Saens, a deep unfillable sorrow, laced with joy of all things in Faure. I've cherished the madness of the Bonzo dogs and stolen lines from Eels to make people laugh.

It's what draws me to poetry too (my musical track record is abysmal), that constant exploration of ourselves, the wit and interplay of emotion and intellect. The way you can capture complex, almost inexpressible notions in a short phrase (or melody).

And it keeps giving, a relationship that doesn't get sour or old or bitter, a lover that doesn't get bored when your jokes get old and bits start to sag. It is reliable, steady and deep, and there is always more than you heard, more to discover. One thing more than all the rest- it can be nothing but honest, it is what it is.

I try to keep up with all the incidental stuff, the names of the people, the songs the albums, but it's a bit superfluous in my opinion- the music is what matters. The rest is fan-boy geekdom. It's like all those people who like football but only seem to talk about the players and the managers and the stats- surely if you like the stupid game it would be the actual act of playing you'd really be interested in?

I'm overly impressed by musicians too, probably due to my total lack of musical talent. I imagine what it must be like to be able to play some pieces of music and I would love to learn but my commitment always gets stymied by a fear of failure and I am quickly demoralised when I realise I'm not the next Hendrix or Coltrane. I married a very talented musician and her brother is also incredibly, annoyingly, good, and I secretly love when they practice within earshot but they don't know I'm listening. It seems less forced and more flowing, even with mistakes, maybe because of them there are moments that would shatter your heart with joy.


It's such a glorious, stupendous gift. Such an amazing thing. And I'm totally addicted.