Commuting

I was thinking about music today. Well, I'm always thinking about it, but today especially.

I was in my Fusion on the commute home, with my band Cd on level 5 as usual, and thought, this is awesome. I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be, listening to the exact song I want on (that particular moment was "Just a Girl" but it varies every few minutes, and fortunately, so does the song that's playing). It's a minor miracle that there can be so many songs about the same things, the same themes over and over, the same lines told time and time over, and still they never get old because you can tell it in a different way.

Some day when I'm retired and have nothing better to do than putter around in a sparsely populated house, I'll sit and count all the possible combinations you can make with the notes on a keyboard, and when I'm done with that (if I haven't keeled over by then) I'll figure out how many words you can make with 26 letters and how many ways you can put the two together. I'm pretty sure if there is an answer, it would equal a strange formula involving Pi, infinity and the Bermuda triangle. And yet we keep trying to make the best of the best, that single winning combination that makes us sit up straight and our fingers tighten on the steering wheel and say, "Oh my GOD this song is awesome."

Until I find it, until I write it, I'll stick with my commute home.

Catharsis (no, it's not a biology term...)

So you know that question "If a tree falls and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound?" or something like that... I was wondering, if I write music and play it and leave a little piece of my heart out there in the atmosphere, is it worth it? Is it really music if no one else is there to hear but its creator? Like when you write a letter to someone you hate and it makes you feel a whole lot better because you got all of your pent-up anger out but then you choose to be a nice person and rip it up.

I don't know. Maybe it's worth the catharsis (read: letting out all of your strong emotions) to transfer from brain to paper. Or you rediscover it in four years and use it as the basis for a whole new piece of art (don't lie, you were hoping I was going to say "a whole new world").

But whatever the reason, I won't stop.

If I could draw straight lines, I would make a bar graph to show the percentage of songs that are written about love. The first bar, entitled "LOVE" would cap out at about 98.3%, the second bar, "DRUGS, ALOCOHOL, TRIPPY EXPERIENCES" would reach .5%, and the third and final bar, "SONGS THAT AT FIRST SIGHT ARE NOT ABOUT LOVE BUT REALLY ARE" would make up the remaining 1.2%. I think this is reasonable. Everyone needs to vent, and songwriting happens to be one of the top outlets. Even Adam Sandler and his Thanksgiving turkey song is really about love (a deep desire for poultry, but just the same).

Tonight I am working on a song about the beginning stages of love. Do they exist? Do you just fall into it and then one day one of you voices your opinion? Does it creep up and you don't even know until you realize that fuzzy feeling is present 24 hours a day and most people around you want to smack that gleaming smile right off your face? Who knows. But the point is, however my song turns out, I think it's worth writing if just one other person agrees.