A Love Letter to Music

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Photo courtesy of Sachith Hettigodage

Yesterday I re-watched that video with Jimmy Fallon and Jack Black. The one from The Tonight Show where they did a goofy-yet-earnest remake of Extreme’s “More Than Words” music video. I adore that video. I adore it.

What I love about music is that it can turn even the most irreverent people into beautiful personalities. It doesn’t matter that it’s by accident; you can’t ruin great music with irreverence. Even Will Ferrell, when he did that ridiculous skit with Ryan Reynolds singing “Grace Kelly,” showed something beautiful. Because he hit the notes. Even his goofy face couldn’t ruin it; even the fact that it was gratingly exaggerated didn’t make it un-beautiful. You can’t ruin great music by not respecting it, because the respect is in the music itself. The respect is in the fact that you found it worthwhile to actually hit the notes.

I used to have a friend who liked when I played guitar. One of the things I would do all the time was play the chords of “Eight Days a Week” by the Beatles, while singing filthy nonsense and punch lines instead of the real lyrics. And I think the reason she enjoyed it so much wasn’t because it was funny, but because that’s a beautiful song. That’s also why artists like Weird Al and the quintessential Bo Burnham are so great at their craft — because they give funny somewhere beautiful to live. Bo Burnham’s “Can’t Handle This” is made even funnier because it so tries to mock its own medium. He is actively trying to make the medium of his performance look ridiculous, and it remains uncorrupted. Because the sounds and vibrations are genuinely moving, even though it’s about burritos and Pringles cans. When I watch that video, it brings me to chills and tears. Because there’s something so otherworldly about it. Even though it was Kanye West’s idea, and Kanye is the human equivalent of a screeching seagull.

You can mock literature. You can mock bad paintings. You can mock any other medium of art, because those require the active participation of the audience or viewer. Those media require you to want them to be beautiful, to actively scan the beauty with your eyes and to open your heart to it.

Music is not like that. Music defies mockery. If you’re making actual music, you cannot mock it into not being music. This is why you occasionally detest yourself for tapping your foot or singing the words to songs you desperately want to hate. Even something you have a moral reason to hate, you can’t. Because music cannot be lied to. You can’t trick yourself out of loving music. It’s the most powerful impulse a human being has, other than that which resides in the loins.

So when Jimmy Fallon and Jack Black, two of the least serious people in our species, performed an authentically in-key and on-time version of “More Than Words”, it stuck with me. Even when Black held his hand and his eyes up to the heavens as if to mock the holy note he was hitting, it remained holy. Because he hit it. These two jokesters, for three minutes and forty-one seconds, are holy. They did a thing that is incredibly meaningful. And the way the audience cheers embodies the celebration that they did something serious. They made music. They made that which is moving.

I bought an electric piano a couple of years ago and started teaching myself to play it. I learn songs, slowly and painfully, by watching others play them on YouTube. (I don’t know how to read music, despite playing 3 instruments… and I don’t plan on learning. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’m a difficult person. Maybe because I’m a Struggle Puritan.)

Every time I learn a new song, or finally get the hang of a new lick that uses both hands, I just sit there laughing at my piano. Laughing out loud, alone in my spare bedroom, like a lunatic. Because I cannot believe it’s real. I cannot believe that I can play this instrument. It’s so beautiful that it amazes me. It feels like the greatest privilege in the world to be able to play music on this instrument. It makes the guitar, my first love, look like a Fisher Price toy.

There’s a song from the video game Cyberpunk 2077 that I find hauntingly beautiful. And as far as I can tell, it was made specifically for that game by a band that came together specifically to make that song. It’s not a song that will randomly appear on your music streaming services — like Jack Dawson, it exists only for people who played that game. It’s such a simple, low-fidelity song that was probably recorded in one take, and yet it haunts me. A few guitar chords, and some vague lyrics that leave your mind the privilege of interpreting them, of mapping your own emotional experiences onto them. As good music does. As I’ve written before, great music doesn’t just come out and tell you what it wants to say. It plays with mystique and emotional vagueness. It points you in the general direction of an emotional experience, and trusts you to go there yourself.

Every new song I hear that I think I can learn on the piano fills me up with excitement. I know it’s going to be hard. It’s very hard to learn new songs without being able to read music. But it’s a challenge I want. I want to play that beautiful thing. I want that to be mine to share. I want to feel the notes in my legs and my skull with my electric piano turned all the way up. Sometimes I even fantasize that my neighbors hear it and think “damn that’s loud, but damn is he good at the piano.”

And yet…

As I learn a song, the magic of it fades away. It no longer exists in the abstract; it exists in my own fingers. And then it feels too real, too easy. Once I collect it and possess it, it’s no longer quite so magical. Even what is holy, it seems, is capable of disappointing. Even the most good and pure thing in life, it seems, can let me down. This is why Radiohead won’t play Creep, and Beck always hated playing Loser. Those songs are adored so much by the audience, and have required so much “giving away,” that there’s nothing but a chore left in them for the creators.

Maybe that’s the sacrifice of the musician: as he unearths something he gets to share it, but in giving that magic away, he loses it for himself. In giving away the purest and most loving thing in life, he must then seek that love somewhere else. And the cycle starts over again. He learns a piece of music, he shares it, it empties him, he discovers a new one.

But that’s fine, and I can’t stop anyway. There is always a new song to discover, and to be amazed by. Especially in the world of classical music. I can endlessly chase the high and, unlike with drugs, actually find my reward. I can experience that thing all over again.

When I listen to this music, this thing… just for a moment, it doesn’t matter what hurts. It doesn’t matter how many people I loved have left me. It doesn’t matter that the headlights on my car need fixed or that I’m anxious about work. For a moment, all I can experience is something so alarmingly gorgeous that it makes all of that seem worth it. But not just worth it — utterly immaterial. Nonsensical. Temporary, unhurtful.

There’s some holy space that I enter, when I listen to music in the shower with my mind free to wander. Some space that’s better than real life. As both the hot water and Einaudi’s “Nuvole Bianche” wash over me, I recognize something other. This thing, this composition... there’s something here. There’s something here that isn’t me. There’s something here that’s better than me. Maybe that’s a religious thought.

Maybe we invented God because we had to have an explanation for what music does to us. Or maybe that’s backwards. I don’t know. But it’s the only thing I’ve encountered in life that feels super-natural: better than natural. I just can’t shake the feeling that music is too overpowering to be merely an animal instinct. Too disarming to be merely “evolutionarily adaptive.” There’s no way this thing arose inside of us merely because it helps us get along better and pass along genes. That feels like an inadequate explanation to me.

There are some pieces of music, like that one I listen to in the shower, that feel inevitable. Every note Beethoven ever wrote feels inevitable. Not like something written, but like something excavated intact. Like something that was there, waiting to be discovered, that lines up perfectly with what humans need to hear. Every subsequent note feels like home. Neil Young was melodically clumsy; Beethoven was not. Beethoven dug up things we genuinely needed to hear.

That thing inside me that recognizes music, I don’t know whether it’s magical or it isn’t. I don’t know whether it will live on after my body begins to fester and clot. But it makes life seem like it’s for something. That’s the impression that I get. I don’t know what that thing is, but it’s more real than my life. And it’s so beautiful that it makes me ache.

Music contains that thing. And I haven’t found it anywhere else.

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

Thanks to Brent Donnelly for reading a draft of this.