A Strange Overlap: Music and Words.

Sometimes I find myself listening to music and typing a story or some thoughts or whatever, and I start to get this weird desire to write something that might somehow match the music I'm listening to in order to connect the two mediums and make my experience complete.

I've never been able to fully separate music from words. One feeds into the other.

When I was younger, maybe in second or third grade or so and couldn't really write all that much, I would draw pictures of stories and listen to music on tape cassette to accompany it. I can write without listening to music, and I can definitely listen to music without writing, but when I'm really on a roll, and in the zone, the two are synched up, and I find one song on a loop as I type page upon page upon page. 

I listen to music while I'm reading too, and then whatever it is I was listening to while I was reading that book becomes forever associated with it. When I was a junior in high school, we read In Cold Blood, and I was listening to Soul Junk's 1956 at the time, and now I will forever connect the two. Same thing more recently:  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and All Delighted People. In both of these examples, the music does not really reflect the tone or subject matter of either novel. At all.

But, then again, I associate all music I listen to with certain periods in my life. And it isn't some vague, nostalgic feeling. It is a distinct, specific event or time. My husband thinks this might be one of my special little eccentricities. Virtually every single album I listen to has a connection to something else.  It doesn't just exist on its own, as its own separate entity. Like most things in life, it gets all tangled up with something else.

I'm fortunate to live in a day and age where music is so readily available, because otherwise I don't know what I would do with myself. I'd probably have to seriously take up an instrument. But it seems kind of difficult to play a sonata on the piano and write a novel simultaneously.

(On a side note: this may not be so difficult if it was playing a sonata and a video game simultaneously).

Sometimes the two activities manage to flow together well. But right before I began writing this post, I felt that horrible disjunction between the two. And I'm starting to think that this disjunction indicates something a bit more important: Whatever it was I was writing was getting BORING. So music has also become a bit of a litmus test. If the music I'm listening to can't get the job going, then I'm screwed, right?

Music makes everything better: chores, long commutes, movies, sex, food, books... life. Probably death too. 

I've heard some people argue about how this overload of music and ipods and things are actually bad for us. It's cluttering up our life, etc., and we should be engaging in Socratic dialogues somewhere instead, and so on. As a college instructor, there may be some truth to this, since it seems many people are becoming crippled by their inability to connect with others, and ipods can certainly make it easy to shut the outside world out.

But I think really great music makes for better connection.

I mean, the reason why concerts are such wonderful experiences is due to that sense of communal enjoyment. And this often happens among complete strangers. One can just bask in the sounds and the feeling of the music.

Although it's not an airtight argument, I think music proves God's existence. And it makes my writing work better. It feeds it and helps it grow. It's a little strange, and it maybe marks me as a Gen-Xer, but it's like the music goes from the machine, up the wire, into the headphones, into my ears, down my neck, shoulders, through my arms, and back into my fingertips, and so, onto the page (typing or writing, whatever). It's a cyclical pattern that obeys natural law: nothing is lost. It's all self-contained.

Now, if only I could figure out how music can help me write something I'm not all that inspired to write...