Stories With Notes

'Without music, life would be a mistake.' -Friedrich Nietzsche

To avoid the terribleness that is happening these days, I listen to more music.  More than usual.  Before last November I listened to a number of political podcasts.  I don't listen to them much these days.  It's just too infuriating and stress inducing.  It's one thing to have a politician in power that you don't agree with, it's another thing entirely to have a 'politician' in power that doesn't understand anything that is going on.  I'll still listen to them, but it gets to the point when I just can't anymore.  I hit that point most weeks by Tuesday.  

To fill the time and space in my drives to and from work, I listen to a lot of music.  As such, I have been talking to a lot of people about the types of music or artists they listen to in an attempt to expand my musical library.  While I was talking to some people yesterday, I asked if they had listened to a particular album that came out recently.  I was given a strange look as if my eyes were bleeding.  'You buy albums still?'  I responded 'of course I do, I'm old.'  I don't mean actual CDs, I buy them electronically.  I know that streaming music is more popular and commonplace today than it was even six or seven years ago, I just like owning music.  Sure, it's more expensive to do it this way, but this is my 'old person' mentality.  

There's plenty of times when I just listen to an album over and over again.  Part of it is because the music is connecting with me other times it's because I'm listening to the stories the album is telling.  While it is not true for every single album tells a continuous story, there are plenty that have themes.  One of the wonderful things about songs and music is that it can be interpreted in different ways.  Sometimes the story is obvious, but when you have a song that is ambiguous it leads to conversations.  While you think a song is about one thing, a friend might think it's about something completely different.  If you have that discussion, you'll listen to the song in a completely different way.  

That is the advantage of buying an entire album.  You can listen to it all over and over again and pull the stories out.  Just hearing one single from an album you don't get the full experience.  Sure there are going to be exceptions.  There are going to be albums that don't tell full stories or any stories at all.  It can just be a collection of songs.  This is one of the things I miss about buying a physical CD, the book with all the lyrics typed out.  It was great, you could listen to the songs while reading the words.  Sometimes with songs that I have downloaded, I'll listen to them and basically wonder what is happening.  I don't always listen in depth to individual songs, I just enjoy them.  If you have one song linking to the next and next and so on, don't you pay a little more attention?  Maybe? 

I don't know.  Maybe I'm just getting too old and want the music and songs to mean more than they actually are.  Or maybe they don't write them the way they use to.