🎵 Music
Music is so much:
It’s a unifier unlike anything else – connecting people from different backgrounds, belief systems, political parties… even if only for a moment.
And yet it’s a solitary experience – you may be surrounded by other people, but it’s just you and your mind when really engulfed in music. Different songs also have very personal and unique meanings to each listener.
It’s a bookmark of a very specific time or moment in my life – and a song can bring me back, like nothing else on this universe, to a specific place, time, and feeling.
And yet it’s timeless, closing the perceived gap between who I was when I first heard a song and who I am now.
It’s a way to escape from yourself, giving you momentary relief from those anxieties that won’t stop nagging at you.
And yet it’s a way to find peace in yourself, realizing those things aren’t all that important after all.
How I use music
As a way to momentarily escape from the story I tell myself: Especially live music, and dancing can help (sometimes). It pulls me out of the echo chamber of my own ego-driven thoughts, and then the important stuff starts to surface. That’s why I tend to feel like I have so many profound moments when listening to live music, especially when psychedelics are involved.
As a cheat code: Music is the quickest lever I know how to pull on my own mood: it can calm me down, get me amped up, make me work faster (Drum N’ Bass), and so much else.
As nostalgia: Songs are bookmarks in my life story. They don’t just remind me of a year or a season – they bring me back into it in a way that feels more alive than your average, everyday memory.
Some thoughts on music
Playing music is curating a space for the listeners.
Because music, while being very connective, is a very personal thing. We are quite literally experiencing the music inside of ourselves.
And music can have an extraordinary impact on our emotional state. I think it’s one of the few places in our modern world where we willingly give up control of our emotions to something bigger than ourselves. Typically, we pride ourselves on resilience in the face of our emotions, and the ability to control our emotions despite our external circumstances.
But music blatantly takes that control away.
And so, I think of music as creating a space that allows different emotions to be felt. But the most incredible part is that these emotions can be felt in a way that’s separate from our experiences and the story we tell ourselves.
Our deepest emotions are typically tied to painful memories which trigger trauma responses. And so, we may not even be able to feel and recognize these most painful emotions – our body doesn’t allow us.
But music has taught me that these emotions don’t have to be so painful.
So when I think of genres in music, which I know are loose constructs, I think about the different emotions these genres bring out in us. And from that perspective, I think of the genres that we choose as our favorites as being representations of the emotions that we’re most willing to feel.
I don’t know if any of this really means anything. Or if there’s anything actionable to take away from this. Just some thoughts.
Playlists of my life
All Time Kyle (ATK) Playlist: Working on this.
Playlists of My Life (see explanation – working on this)