When We Hear Music

The places and situations that music graces

Photo by Mohammad Metri on Unsplash

Sometimes, when and where you encounter a song forever colors how it’s heard moving forward. The same is true of those artists we hear for the first time under the right circumstances, or beside the right friends.

The best music is transcendent. And part of music’s beauty is that where that magic lies is in the ears of each beholder.

For some, an airy, cosmic place can be found in the most demonic death metal and atonal EDM music. For others, it’s in Beethoven’s softened trills or in the Grateful Dead’s most enduring solos where they find escapes to distant places. But those faraway corners of expression don’t need to be otherworldly or beatific for us to slink away and lose ourselves in sound.

Some music encourages a presence of mind — a reflection upon those thoughts and losses that ail us most deeply. Some songs encourage confrontation. They want catharsis to spring from the ordered composite of notes they overlay. But some music is as scattered as splatter paint strewn indelicately across an off-white wall. It can be as orderless, definitionless, and open to interpretation as the most abstract of art.

How these tastes and affections form around songs and albums is often circumstantial. When a first love or a person here no longer introduces us to that beautiful, boundless, or strange concoction of notes, a song rises to more than the sum of its parts.

Those songs that latticed my first relationship will forever be associated with feelings and places. The love no longer lingers while the melodies still do.

Sometimes notes surface like smells of bygone times. They waft down unfamiliar streets and send me somersaulting back to a youthful world of caterpillars and cerulean skies.

Lyrics and cadences are cemented into the drives down certain streets. The right avenue on a swampy August day will leave me yearning until the melody emerges.

Even a music video, movie, or TV show can change how the trills within familiar songs are heard. The song “On The Nature Of Daylight” conjures a sense of timelessness as I think back to its seamless use in the movie Arrival. I’ll never be able to dissociate one from the other, and I’ll never care to. The song creates a movie in my mind.

The cinematic uses of songs can add additional shades — shades they might not have had on their own. More artists and creators went into crafting the specific feelings they now elicit. They carry a defined visual component that they wouldn’t have carried by themselves. Sometimes, as with a novel, we might prefer to create the meaning behind each song.

We might rather craft each character in our mind’s eye, envisioning each scene, room, and scenario for ourselves individually. But inversely, just as there are those stories we would have never discovered were they not made into movies, the right melody at the end of a soul-stirring film or at a pivotal moment in life can imbue it with new emotion.

“The Writing’s on the Wall” by OK Go comes with a wistful affection and an appreciation of change as I reflect back on a breakup with my high school girlfriend. The dissonant nature of the lyrics and the accompanying music video create something that the audio can’t quite capture on its own. The vocals and instrumentals are playfully overlaid atop a series of exhilarating optical illusions and stir a sense of whimsy in the face of loss. While the band was never one I loved much beyond that singular song, its clashing, upbeat melody paints a picture I keep proudly hung upon the walls of my mental castle.

Had the song sounded from a different speaker at a less fraught time in life — had I never seen that jovial video with which it’s so wonderfully paired — it may not be a part of me at all. I wouldn’t know the lyrics. And I wouldn’t have the song to return to each time life spawns similar feelings.

Even the most outrageous of superhero films have weird ways of augmenting an array of notes. The Guardians of the Galaxy series breathed life into many of the hackneyed hits of the past with their ingenious — often ironic and self-mocking — inclusions. Now, each time that I hear Jay and the Americans’ “Come a Little Bit Closer,” it’s accompanied by the lovable memory of a spaceship full of aliens being bested by a wise-cracking raccoon, a blue man with a metal mohawk and his impressively murderous pen, and a talking tree toddler.

Sometimes, those bizarre contexts in which we first hear a song are what forever spell their value. Discordant or otherwise, the right arrangement of notes can work wonders when transplanted onto the right scene. They can even represent high points in otherwise subpar projects.

A Murder at the End of the World could hardly have underwhelmed me more with its tepid ending. But because the show gifted me the equal parts buoyant and evocative “No More ‘I love you’s,” it will always hold a soft spot in my heart.

I never found much affection for the X-Men series in the same way that I did its Marvel counterpart. But X-Men: Days of Future Past’s employment of the song “Time in a Bottle” by Jim Croce changed how I hear it. Now, it evokes perfectly apt images of Evan Peters darting around a scene of frozen pandemonium — redirecting bullets in mid-air and making villains punch themselves.

Whether happy, hilarious, or sad in essence, there’s no predicting the tones that certain songs will take for each listener. There’s no knowing the places inside of us where they’ll ultimately sit. Life can alter any tune. Blissful and ecstatic can become haunting and forlorn.

In the song “Wake Me Up” by Avicii, I see the torment that colored my friend’s last few years. I see the stark and eerie way he befell the same fate as that gone-far-too-soon singer. I see a somber video in my mind of my own making.

But in “Message in a Bottle” and “Witch Doctor,” my final joyous night with that same friend comes to life with new meaning. Ecstasy and impulse and drunken spontaneity are freckled with feelings of loss. The bright and happy songs take on an air that’s harsh, conflicting, and inharmonious. But they also house bittersweet memories of a night and a person I never want to forget. Images of that final walk through the scintillating neon of those familiar festival grounds are forever encased in music.

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This article was originally published on Medium.

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