I wonder what it is like to listen to music and just think “that’s nice.”
It’s been a long time since I have felt that was the case, and I almost miss it. It gets fairly tiring getting pulled so emotionally in every direction during the few minutes a song is running, or sometimes, the whole album. Of course, not everything I listen to immediately hits me like that, or if I am listening to something extremely casually without paying attention to what is going on, I don’t tend to find myself getting emotional. But, how does one get attached? And how does that stay?
When I listen to music, I try as hard as I can to listen to whole albums at once. They were built to be a solid piece for a reason, so I am going to abide by what the artist was trying to convey. Yeah, I have playlists and listen to singles as they come through, but if I can help it, I’m doing the whole album drag. Typically in my car, from my box of CDs. The whole album experience really helps dive deep into the emotion the album was trying to pull in the first place, it’s like a story.
Secondly, I try to give the album my attention and time. It’s really easy to listen to an album while doing other things, but you miss a lot of the details. You don’t hear the lyrics, you miss that really important harmony. All the subtleties that can really make or break a song, or tug at your heartstrings.
If I find that I really enjoy an album, I listen to it constantly. I read the lyrics, break down each instrumental section, try to find the reasons the artists wrote the song. I want to really dig into the details.
But none of those reasons are really why I get so attached. Those are just habits I’ve picked up that might contribute to the emotional whole, but that’s not much on its own. It’s because music finds me at just the right time, at just the right pivot, at just the right emotion to sit with me. A song that I once listened to casually starts to catch in my throat in a turn of a single listen. A song which mean little suddenly starts to mean a lot because it was in the background while my friend and I had a serious conversation. An album which was important became immediately more important when I realized I could no longer sing along to it with my best friends.
When I finally break down the song, and I hear the lyrics and the instrumentals in their own parts I tend to find a home in those words and the melodies. There are a few songs whose bass lines remind me of a very specific night this past summer, with some very special people. It’s crazy.
Though it would be nice to not have a song show up randomly on my playlists and punch me in the face with its realism, it is also quite pleasant to find such a home in something that I can play on repeat, and call a constant.
