As I write this, I am self-medicating to counteract a funk. I had the blues pretty badly, but the antidote is cleaning that mess up very well. The cause of the melancholy? Music. The cure? Music.
Having gotten one of her songs stuck in my head, I decided to listen to Jessica Lea Mayfield’s Blasphemy So Heartfelt on the drive to my day job this morning. It was not the best movie I’ve ever made. While it’s a beautiful album – good from start to finish – it can break my heart in seconds. As I began to sink low, I thought, “No problem. I’ll just pop in the Black Keys’ Brothers when I get to the office and be revived.” (No, I do not actually talk like that in my head.)
My surefire cure was delayed until lunchtime thanks to my Monday morning forgetfulness that caused my headphones to be left on the kitchen table, but that gave me time to ponder, not for the first time, the powerful connection between music and emotion. I have always been what I term “music sensitive”. I can be going along happy as anything only to be stopped dead in my tracks by a song with the right – or, arguably, wrong – tone. Once while on a date, my companion left the table to use the restroom only to return minutes later to find me on the verge of despondency. What had happened? I pointed upward to indicate the restaurant’s P.A. system which was piping out one of Gloria Estefan’s easy-listening love songs. While I could make a joke that just hearing Gloria Estefan had made me sad, it was the minor key chords, the plaintive vocals, and maybe even the tepid lyrics about love lost, that affected me.
I’ve often wondered how many others are thus affected. Author Nick Hornby would clearly be a fellow music-sensitive, judged by a single quote from High Fidelity alone: Did I listen to pop music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to pop music? Even emotions themselves garner music-derived nicknames. When we are sad, we are in a funk or have the blues. When we are excited about something, we’re jazzed. And it’s obvious from just even a cursory survey of the history of music that the emotional nature of song is a foremost component in the creation and continuation of music.
But are other people as instantaneously and acutely affected as I am? Does Skip James’ “Devil Got My Woman” leave anyone else with an empty heart (but an oddly satisfied soul) every time she listens to it? Is Brothers like a double dose of Vivarin for other drivers on long roadtrips? Is there another person in the world who cries every time he hears Kathy Mattea’s “Where’ve You Been”? (There, now you know my secret shame.) Have you ever had the whole tenor of your day altered by a handful of words and notes?
Or am I just a freak?
