It's half past Christmas and I'm wide awake, probably on account of the long nap I took a few hours ago. I just finished watching Scrooge with the parents and I'm not quite ready to fall asleep yet, and I'm not in the right mental state to try and write more of my next novel, so here I am writing a blog piece that will most likely go quietly unnoticed.
But hey, I never said I was good at marketing my writing. Something I do consider myself pretty good at, however, is music.
Yes . . . that's a good enough segue. Let's stick to that.
Music is an aspect of my life that never really took hold until I was well past the most awkward parts of my teenage years. It started when one of my Dad's old friends bought him an acoustic guitar (which my Dad used to play way back in the day) and I decided it was something I wanted to learn too. So I bought myself a cheap electric and the smallest 10 watt amp on the market and sat down like an idiot and tried to teach myself how to play 'Don't Fear the Reaper.'
I'll spare you the details of the intervening time, but suffice to say that it's eight years later and I can finally rock the shit out of that song. I don't want to spend a lot of time prattling on about my history playing music or what it was like being in a band because I know that stuff is only going to be interesting to me and future historians after I get famous. What will I get famous for? Go ask the future historians and then fill me in, because I haven't got a clue.
Music in general was something that I really didn't start appreciating until after I started playing it. Sure, I listened to it regularly, but usually just on the radio. I didn't start buying CD's for quite awhile, and I never paid much attention to particular bands or a specific genre. That all changed once I started playing, my hands fumbling over a fret board as my ears slowly became attuned to the nuances of the infinite sounds capable of being made. Like my writing, I look at a motionless fretboard the way I do a blank page - full of limitless possibilities. You can literally go anywhere with it. It provides a degree of expression that very few other mediums can match.
As I said in my last blog entry regarding religion, I'm not very convinced about the notion of the divine, but I will admit that if there was ever a bridge to the human soul, it would be through music. It's one of the few artistic mediums that allows almost instantaneous transcendence. In order to feel anything while watching a movie or reading a book, you need to invest a certain amount of time into the material, but music can alter the way we think and feel after mere seconds of listening to it. We listen to music to match our feelings and to sometimes alter them. It can elevate us, or bring us down.
I almost always listen to music when I write my novels. There are certain songs and artists that I listen to at length to put me in a particular mood. Anything by Clint Mansell is pretty reliable to be depressing as hell, and he's probably the artist I listen to the most. Orchestrated/instrumental music is the best I find, because the sounds (without lyrics to guide you) allow your emotions to ebb and flow with the tide of the tones, to interpret the notes in your own way. For me, music fuels my passions, artistic or otherwise, which is why I almost consider it a meta-art, one that exists above the rest.
I simply love music. I love its power to transport our minds and transcend our souls in a way that almost seems magical. How can a collection of notes have such an effect on us? How can we feel more in the span of five minutes than we do over the course of an entire day?
Music is magic, plain and simple.
