On Music
Singing in the shower, humming doing the housework, jamming out kinda stuff.
Dear reader,
How are you? I hope you’re doing okay out there. If you are, here’s some music. If you aren’t, here’s some other music. I’m sure by now you get the gist of what this week’s newsletter is about.
I’ve been dreaming in music lately.
Even before I open my eyes, I can hear the low, rumbling guitar, the tense drums - it reminds me of the minutes before a storm breaks. The latest song? One of These Nights by Eagles. I’m not a huge Eagles fan or anything, but this one seems to stick.
Sometimes this is how a poem begins: I start to fixate on a song and play it until the words come out of me. Until then I have to know everything possible about the music, the writing, and the artist themselves.
Music is that fantastic meeting point between time, complex math, art, and performance. There are cult-favourite songs that showcase its mathematical nature, like Lateralus by Tool (the Fibonacci sequence. There are songs, that when performed, can bring lightning down to Earth out of nowhere.
There are odes to girlhood, and painful stories of lovers gone. There are songs that bring freedom to whole nations, and theme songs of our favourite TV shows, designed to excite us for what’s to lie ahead. This video has Nicholas Britell take us behind the scenes of the score of HBO’s Succession.
Mostly, we love patterns. Visual patterns, gustatory patterns, and in this case - audial patterns. This website showcases just how much we love the same chord patterns, even if it shows up in different songs.
But what makes music all the more wonderful? Perhaps it’s the memories we share of friends playing guitar, singing along and making merry. Perhaps it’s those songs that seem to read your mind with its lyrics. Maybe it’s how a whole decade can be defined by just one sound: the way drum-and-bass wriggles its way into everything on today’s top charts, or how piano ballads instantly take you back to 2011, listening to Adele in the parking lot.
Really, any song can bloom into something divine, if we take the time to really listen. In The Better Listener’s Club, Shardul Bapat (founder of Pune School of Music, violinist for the award-winning indie folk band Easy Wanderlings, and full-time ball of sunshine) invites us to do just that. What does it take to really listen? Find out in Shardul’s video here.
Sometimes, a song is just because a song is.
Sending you some sweet tunes this week,
Kaav.