music

Spending the bigger chunks of my day studying means constant music. I really love music so much, and in the most recent immersion, I came to the thought that being with music is like being with a person. And not for memories associated with people, but because music is this living, organic thing to which you form real, heavy ties.

In listening to albums all the way through, and listening to multiple albums by the same musician, and seeing the same musician perform at different concerts in different venues, themes diffuse from the sounds to inside, and the layers shift and unveil. The National likes concepts surrounding lemons, geese, and years. There are a couple songs that Thao Nguyen always plays in concert, that I wasn't fond of before, but have grown to form a sort of attachment to because she's obviously attached, and because each time she plays them, they have a different feel, and I love that dynamic factor of moving art that people breathe.

It's funny, how despite all that movement, how much of the time when I listen to a song or album, I feel the same as I did when I first came to know it, no matter how much time and distance has grown since then. Listening to Plans (Death Cab) the other week, I felt the twinges of the summer when I first loved it, and not as a former remnant but as its complete whole, as if I was back in that carpeted room, stacking my CDs on the stereo playing those bittersweet songs, finding it insanely hard to move my hands because I was in such heartbreak over changes back then. I remember sitting at the office in Vietnam, when my co-worker played James Blunt, and I wanted to die, thousands of miles and two years away from when that song first made me feel and hurt. Regardless of listening to old music in new places, new periods of time, new places in life, how I knew it first always comes back.

In those ways and in other ways music is both less and more real than real life, and I like that funny, deeply strong state of feeling, even if it's more of an ache than anything else.