It never hurts to repeat fundamental truths.
Music does something to me, and I’ve never been able to explain exactly why. It just happens. Sometimes when I walk into a supermarket and hear a song on the sound system, my attention disappears into space. I stop dead and forget the shopping list. My wife becomes understandably exasperated.
I can’t not listen. In similar fashion, I can’t not read words wherever I see them.
My earliest childhood memories have melodic accompaniment. When very young, I’d go to sleep to the cracklings of an ancient AM radio, and perhaps that’s why absolutely nothing about being five years old remains intact in my memory except for hearing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”
The grooves on a LP collection of children’s music subsequently were worn and frayed. I recall two cuts in particular: An American folk song called “One More Day,” and Mozart’s “Turkish Rondo.”
The anecdotes are both endless and tedious, but the point is this: Music plays inside my noggin at all times, and has done so for as long as I can remember. It is central to my being. And yet, for all the ways that music is the soundtrack of my life, I possess no musical...Read more
