Please Don't Stop the Music

If you don't love or aren't passionate about music or at least respect it, then you won't appreciate the remainder of the words written here, so you can stop reading now. It's kind of just my rambling anyway so if you have other things to do, do them. Only if you have 5-7 minutes to absolutely waste without consequence should you continue.

Now that I've self-deprecated myself down to around three readers I'll begin: 

I started thinking about music and the impact it has had on me when I noticed my 10 month old dancing to some stupid toy we have that plays a horrendous version of Baa Baa Black Sheep. I thought, my 10 month old is dancing. She can't walk, she can't talk, she can't feed herself (unfortunately) or use the toilet (double-unfortunately) yet, she's dancing. What is making her do that!? Music. Already, music is seeping into her body, her bones and making her move for reasons she doesn't know why. As adults we do it too. Tapping our feet without realizing when our ears receive a catchy beat. Chair-dancing or butt-dancing - moving to the groove while seated, usually in a car. This is my fave as it requires a lot of shoulder, arms, head and neck action.

So naturally, by free-association I ended up thinking about when I first, FIRST remember music and falling in love with it. When I was five, Santa brought me a full-size upright piano. Imagine lugging that around in the sleigh all night. Hopefully we were an early stop. He wrapped that son-of-a-bitch and everything! I remember looking at it with surprise and some curiosity at the time. I had not known a thing about the massive instrument I'd spend the rest of my life loving. My parents...and Santa, took a huge leap of faith with the hope that I'd say yes to piano lessons. I did. Phew! Are pianos even returnable? 

"This is Middle C." That was my first note. The rest was just alphabet and math. Strip it down and that's what music is. And so then and there I made 88 new friends. $5/week for 13 years, my teacher, Mrs. Marshall, saturated me with her music genius and wouldn't let me "advance" until I'd perfected the prior week's lesson which usually included, a scale or two and a couple of songs. I mastered sight-reading and hated recitals. Above all else, I learned the back-end of music - it wasn't just something I listened to anymore.

I love it - all of it. Melodies, harmonies, rhythms, lyrics, chords, scores, how it looks on paper. I think it all rocks - pun. Aside from playing and performing music both via piano and band (concert, jazz and marching (yup, total nerd in da house!!)), I began to appreciate music and broaden my definition of what was "good." 

Like certain scents, a song can take you back to a specific moment in time with just one note. For some reason my best friend and I got our hands on a couple of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blood Sugar Sex Magik tapes when we were 10 years old. We'd walk around town with our Walkmans playing the same song at the same time - Apache Rose Peacock. Why that song I'll never know, and while it had a meaning a 10 year old shouldn't know, I loved it. And I still love it to this day; I know every word. So when you hear an RHCP song, I don't know where it takes you, but I think about walking around town with my best friend being happy and thinking we were cool. The next year I ordered my first CDs from one of those mail music clubs that used to but no longer exist. Bryan Adams (thanks to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and my crush on Kevin Costner which I still have to this day) and Tori Amos, Little Earthquakes. 

"Oh. My. God...Becky..." Yup, I'm at The Hut - a local tween/teen "club", now closed, that we used to go to from about age 12.  Easily, the most-played song on that jukebox, later to be replaced by I'm Too Sexy.  "Poor pussy..." 

Junior High - angsty pre-teen in-betweenness. Who am I? No one understands, especially my parents. "WITH THE LIGHTS OUT...IT'S LESS DANGEROUS!!!" "What's a mulatto? ...  OOOooohh." I also became a tiny bit infatuated with album covers thanks to Nevermind. "Did they really put that naked baby underwater?" I would also become very upset when the CD booklets didn't contain the lyrics. Let's face it, Eddie Vedder doesn't enunciate 100% of the time but that doesn't lessen my love for Pearl Jam. To this day, I still have every single CD booklet/cover I've ever had despite my husband's recurring inquiry as to what the hell I'm going to do with them. "I don't know...I just don't want to get rid of them." Maybe, someday, the cover for the Blues Traveler four CD, will be worth a couple bucks. Maybe not, but if so? Aubrey: 1, World: 0

Dave. Matthews of course. Although I enjoy other Daves - Letterman, Grohl, Gray....Hasselhoff. Dave Matthews is my favorite by miles. The summer when I was 16 I purchased Crash. Mmmm, Dave...being 16, summer. Before Dave, I loved harmonies. After Dave, crazy loved harmonies. I would better some of the more mediocre shit on the radio by adding harmonies to them in my head and still do. 

College. Yeesh. Day 1 - move in day. I realized I wasn't in Benzie County anymore when my yet-to-be-met dorm neighbor was blaring...BLARING...O Fortuna from Carmina Burana. It was then followed by Con Te Partiro as performed by Andrea Bocelli. And that opened a tiny, little, undiscovered doorway to Opera. La Traviata is amazing. Check it out. 

College. Yeesh. Day 2 - The roommate of dorm neighbor blared...BLARED Scarlet's Independent Love Song. Utter ridiculousness and I found that a song does not need to be good to be appreciated and totally awesome. The primest of prime examples is Biz Markie's You Got What I Need.  I mean, when the man interrupts himself just to get through the chorus, you've crossed a line into greatness. Did you know that Snow by Informer has actual lyrics? Like, English ones? No one knew that, except for the "A licky boom boom down..." part.

Lyrics. In college, my housemate and I would joke, "If only we could remember what we're studying as well as we can remember song lyrics, we'd be acing this shit." Maybe if we had set our studies to the tune of Jump Around by House of Pain we would have retained more. Alas, we didn't but still both left with 4-year degrees. 

I went to visit my friend where she went to college once. She was going to set me up with some dude who was a friend of the dude she was seeing or something. Ben Harper, Live From Mars (disc 2) was on - clearly his hook-up CD. Unfortunately we hated each other and got along about as well as a couple of politicians so while it wasn't written in the stars for us, I'm thankful he turned me on to Ben Harper. Power of the Gospel  makes me cry. Every time. 

Speaking of hook-up CDs, one of my good friends from college and I were always striving to make the perfect hook-up soundtrack or a CD of the most depressing songs we could find because being single was the worst feeling in the world. Instead we always ended up putting something ludicrous on it like the theme from Three's Company, so they never really got used. We weren't as depressed as we thought. 

And speaking of soundtracks, I intently listen to background and soundtrack music now (thanks to Pulp Fiction, one of the best soundtracks of all time*). Most of the time, it's just there to create a mood or drama but sometimes this music is much better than it gets credit for. A movie without a soundtrack, not the same. It's less evocative.  [*also Garden State, Dazed and Confused, Almost Famous and any 80's movie starring John Cusack].

Elvis Presley's Can't Help Falling in Love (not the UB40's version) will always be associated with my wedding day, how perfect it was. Elvis' voice, with the lyrics and melody. Simple and perfect. I was also 15 pounds lighter, that's nice to think about too. The first time my husband Kyle and I met, he was standing next to a jukebox. Fairly significant, my two true loves. Any George Strait or Blink 182 will make me think of Kyle. So will Party Like a Rockstar because he likes the song although he doesn't party like a rockstar all that often and he isn't fond of strip bars, but maybe that's because the ones where we live leave something to be desired. Sometimes I'll find an old CD of Kyle's that he made in high school or college and I get pleasantly surprised when Total Eclipse of the Heart starts playing. Dude's got a soft spot.

In the end, I still have the piano. It sits in my house now and my two daughters play on it or listen to me play. It's 25 years old and needs to be tuned, but my thought is that everyone needs a good tuning every quarter of a century or so anyway. But it still works and has all its parts. I hope it does for them what it's done for me.