Musing about Music Again

The world exists by combination. As a kid, I remember moments of implosion as I tried to comprehend how only 10 numbers could make up thousands and thousands of different phone combos. Or as a teenager, the sickening fullness of realizing eternity means never-ending, forever. Or even now, as I try to figure out how to make music, disbelief at the innumerable melodies possible through the limited handful of key signatures. As I ache and yearn and try to put melodies to lyrics, everything I make feels aged the instant it exists. I feel like Solomon trying his hand at pleasure and realizing that there is nothing new under the sun. I think about the prolificacy of The Beatles wondering how, between the same four people, hundreds of timeless melodies could be concocted.

And I don’t know whether to despair of such a thing happening for me or to be encouraged that such a thing could happen for them. When I finally rustle up enough self-worth and hope to try writing, I sit down to the keys and instantly feel frightened – the same frightened feeling I got as a teenage-confused, staring at the sky and slowly peeling away from my rationality as I imagined the space and time of endlessness. The moment I press a combination of keys, I know that there’s about five hundred more that will express my lyrics with so much more empathy, with better variance, that could carry any listener away from cloud 3 to cloud 9. Introducing melodies to their lyrics is like chance encounters in coffee-shops or on park benches – chance conversations that you certainly don’t ask for but that graciously enliven those parts of your thoughts you were not even aware needed to be enlivened. Music made is an act of grace allowing something you never could have even dreamed of existing into existence.