Musical feelings

I bought several CDs recently by bands I’ve liked for years. I haven’t had time to listen to any of these CDs much at all, because of work and family. This is a huge change from my formative years as a music listener. I used to get new music and hole up in my room, sitting and listening, while reading the liner notes and lyrics. I miss that, and I look forward to doing that again some day on a regular basis.

Having kids changed my relationship to music. For one thing, I don’t listen to as much dark and aggressive music as often because I’m around my kids so much. That’s not the kind of tone I want for my kids. Even more than that, I’m not in that kind of mood nearly as much. I’m often tense and angry and sad, but when I’m with my kids I feel that way a lot less, and I feel other much happier feelings. My kids have also narrowed the scope of my bad feelings. I’m unhappy about specific things much more now - money, health insurance, work hours, job security, climate change, stuff like that - and I’ve lost almost all of the general sense of unhappiness I’ve sometimes had, and a lot of the music I really like is more oriented toward general unhappiness than toward specific things that suck. More simply, it’s just hard to connect with that music while having a fun time being silly with my kids.

Playing music went by the wayside with my kids too. Keeping up an active life as a music maker requires time and energy and commitment, and I didn’t prioritize that when my responsibilities changed with becoming a parent. That’ll change back someday, and I look forward to it. Some of this is also financial. Some of my equipment wore out and I’m pretty broke, and we live in a small place so there’s not much room to play music anywhere where the sound won’t carry and wake up my kids if they’re sleeping, and that’s when I have most of my minimal free time. If I can get a better paying job eventually, I could imagine doing a bit of music writing on the bus. I occasionally mess around with Audacity on the bus. Anyway.
The new CDs I got are full of sad and angry feelings artfully expressed. Listening to them, I feel all that stuff again. I’m excited to listen to them more closely, with more of my attention. Some of the old unhappy feelings I had that connected with this music are much more muted now. There are some new ones, including some wistful feelings about my changing relationship to music, and about aging. I got into music as a young person and I had a youth culture relationship to music. I’m not old but I’m not young enough to be at home in youth culture anymore, even if I had the time.

Sad and angry music still speaks to me, though, because it expresses feelings I have. There’s something about musical expression in particular that is really powerful. I always fumble for words when I try to talk and write about this. I’d like to think that this is in part because part of what I’m on about is the limit of what can be expressed in clear written form. Let me try an analogy. Maybe fifteen years ago two missionaries knocked on the door of the house we were renting. I was busy, I can’t remember what I was doing. I told them they could come back the next night if they wanted to, because I knew I was free. I was trying to be open minded and nice. They came back. I’m not a believer by any means but I wanted to hear them out. They told me about their faith, and read to me from their religious materials. They asked me to pray with them. I said I wouldn’t do that because I don’t believe what they believe and that praying with them felt like lying. One of them said that he knew his beliefs were true because when he read these passages from religious texts, he had a powerful feeling inside him. I said that I believed he had that feeling, but I didn’t, so I didn’t have that sense of the truth of his beliefs. He tried to tell me about this strong feeling and how it felt, and when he felt it. I listened politely, but didn’t feel it. We talked a bit more and they left. When I listen to the right kind of music, I get a strong feeling like that. I know it’s the right kind of music because of that feeling. Sometimes I recommend music to people based on my strong responses, or someone recommends something to me, and we find out that we just connect differentl. What’s the right music for me is only sometimes the right music for someone else, and vice versa. When I meet people who connect similarly to similar music, it feels really good. There’s something about music that evokes and expresses these strong feelings that can’t be gotten at otherwise, except maybe for some people through religious texts.