I was 9-years-old when I first became aware of the power of music. I was at Camp Unistar in Cass Lake, Minnesota. I spent the week swimming in warm, murky and leech filled waters, and running around the island with my friends.
The end of the week culminated in a dance. This was 2007 and the song “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley played endlessly on every car radio in America that summer. I first heard that song that night and became instantly enamored. It was as though someone had injected heroin into my ears. Thankfully, the song played several times throughout the dance and hundreds of times once I got home to Boise, Idaho. I realized that I couldn’t listen to that song without being flooded of memories of the lake or the people that I had become friends with. That summer was the first of many times that I realized the incredible power of music, the power it has to connect us with ourselves, each and moments in our lives.
Since then, I have fallen in love with many other songs that each bring me back to specific moments, places, and people in my life. I have compiled six reasons, why I your neighborhood music addict find it impossible to live with listen to endless amounts of music.
1. The feeling when you hear a really great song for the first time.
Whether you’re curled up in a homework nest listening to Spotify, at a restaurant or driving down a rain soaked road at night, you will sometimes experience those rare perfect moments when the most incredible song comes on. These moments are few and far between and always leave me with the urge to listen to said song five hundred times over the course of the next week.
2. Songs that you are unable to listen to without feeling like the world is going to end.
There are quite a few songs that I love dearly, but avoid listening to due to their capacity to leave me feeling unsettlingly sentimental. I have found that music is closely tied to nostalgia. As someone who used to do musical theater, I am all too aware of the power of a song to hit you with waves of nostalgia the morning after closing.
3. Being exposed to other people’s musical taste.
As an amateur sleuth and someone who enjoys reading people, I thoroughly enjoy stalking people’s playlists on Spotify. Music can be very personal and a person’s tastes can give you an insight into their brain. Now, analyzing each individual song isn’t necessary, but knowing someone’s musical preferences can give you a lot of insight into their intrinsic energy.
4. Exercising with music.
According to Costas Kargeorghis of Brunel University in London, one of the world’s leading experts on the psychology of music wrote that one could think of music as “a type of legal performance-enhancing drug.” Indeed, the psychological effects of music and exercise are incredible. Music distracts people from pain, increases endurance, reduced their perceived efforts and improves anaerobic respiration. When listening to music, people run farther bike longer and swim faster than usual-without even realizing it. (Scientific American).
5. Making people playlists.
My two favorite things in the world are art and other human beings. Music bridges across both of these categories and making people playlists or receiving playlists is the best. There is nothing better than being in a car with someone and exposing them to your personal taste in music, it’s oddly personal and wordless experience that can bind people together.
6. Listening to music constantly.
As someone with forty five Spotify playlists and a deep affinity for music, I typically listen to music for several hours of week. I listen when I bike to work or downtown, when I’m falling asleep and always when I’m writing. I’ve noticed that I’m an infinitely more productive human being when I’m writing an essay and listening to “Welcome to Lunar Industries” as opposed to writing in silence. Music has the ability to make us into happier human beings and better people. I have listened to music during both difficult and amazing times in my life. I have become friends with many people simply because we happened to be in the same choir or the same show. Jazz flutist Paul Horn described music as “a power to bring people together…It is one of the most power ‘weapons’ if you will, that be have for peace and understanding, and to communicate and begin to connect with each other.”
