Cut all music out of your days, remove all music from your experience. Everything. Take away the Beethoven to the Einaudi that you find under an advert, to the smattering of quiet
elevator scenes to the apocalyptic Jazz from basements. Take away the strings behind the Hollywood films, the heartrending ballads or the drums that crash into your body from cinematic, all-enveloping baths of sound. For that matter, take away sound baths. Keep your gongs, keep your flutes, keep your birdsong and your processed beats. Take away the crowd singing You’ll Never Walk Alone at Anfield, take away the Christmas choirs and the operas. Take away the background browsing music in the shops, silence the birthday songs and the shantys. Do you think it’ll all be the just the same? If life were a library. From the sea to Glastonbury, rhythm and sound, and thus rhythmic sound are ever present.
So take that all away and how is your commute into work soundtracking the undulation of vehicles? How is the horror film without the trapeze of music that sharpens its blades along your teeth? What was Woodstock without the music?
Music binds us, it explains us, it expresses us, it connects us, it soothes us, it energises us, it distracts us, it welcomes us into stunning rooms of grief and pulls us up into euphoria. Wordless music says so much, songs sung in languages we don’t know we are able to follow in dance, feeling and narrative.
Because we are a collection of stories. Humans. Collected by us and chosen as our pamphlets to hand out to those we meet. Music is a way of telling stories, it combines narratives, sonic and linguistic, emotive and humanizing.
Our wellbeing is intrinsically tied to narrative and stories. The narrative we have of the world, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and what we can be, the stories we tell others of what to expect from us. The narratives we give to those we encounter. Within music, we connect with others through this in ways obvious and defined and also in a more unknown way.
I have no idea why I like the music I like and others don’t. If we were all the same, surely we would like all the same music? I can explain why I like something to a point. To make that stranger, I am a musician. So I have created these narratives, yet my language is not universal.
So if our wellbeing is a combination of the Huge and the Infinitesimally Small, the Cosmic and the Mundane. What better insulating packaging whatsits than music to accompany me into the world?
Music dresses time. I remember laying in bed late at night listening to the Beatles on a discman when I should be sleeping, I remember driving through Fife and hearing Shania Twain on cassette. I remember hearing The Strokes’ Is This it played in a Camden record shop at 14 – I stayed for the opening track and then when they kept playing it through, me and my friend Ollie sat down on the floor and listened to the entire album from start to finish. I remember hearing Springsteen sing a line in Dancing in the Dark ‘I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face’ and at the age of 8 in the back of a car thinking to myself that I had never heard something so obvious and so true that I connected with so viscerally and having absolutely no idea why, because I was 8.
I have cried my eyes out to music, I have felt reassured, I have felt lonely, I have felt angry, I have felt alive and I have felt like lightning. I have felt. It has always allowed me to go a little deeper and stay a little longer, and when I hear Suzanne by Leonard Cohen I think about my dad, immediately. In amongst the torrent of my memories and existence, to have something so clear and direct like that, an emotional ‘as the crow flies’ to such a specific person, helps me navigate my memory.
We are complicit, music and me, in witnessing each other over the last 34 years, mischievous and sincere, I’ve leant upon the discographies of hundreds of thousands of others’ experience and storytelling to see me through.
This is not about a scientific or therapeutic explanation of the power of music in healing, I am not equipped to give you that information, but it is used as an intervention for so many wonderful reasons and I would implore you to explore what it genuinely means for you in your life. I have gone into this investigation from a purely joyful and expressive avenue in my work with clients and it is something that will always be a part of how I operate.
I’ll stop talking with one question, what have you been listening to recently?
