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 skills.
None.
Instruments are a mystery to me, and my voice, once capable of decently carrying a tune for the legendary FCHS choral director Mick Neely, has digressed through decades of misuse and abuse to the point of shower stall braying when alone, safely away from the ears of humans, if not our terrified cats. I listen, drum fingers, hum, whistle, and participate as best I can.
It’s enough.
My conclusion? If there is a music gene, I possess a variant of it. Music has spoken to me from the beginning. Had my formative years been spent with musicians as role models as opposed to athletes, perhaps it all would have turned out differently. As it stands, I’ve no complaints.
The innate pleasure to be derived from listening to music is more of an essential heartbeat than an optional amusement, and I can’t imagine life otherwise. If the music in my head ever stops playing, it will be the unmistakable sign of imminent death — and as all atheists know, death is a symphony without encores.
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As such, my mission each year is to find new musical releases of the sort that Roger likes. It’s as simple as that.
These might be rock, pop, world music, classical or...Read more