Gray on 10/8/2019 at 11:27
Yes, always always. I just woke up, and right now it's Seabound: Poisonous Friend, because I played four remixes while I was out last night walking in the rain. When I woke up during the night, it was Eisbrecher: Rot Wie Die Liebe. I often hear that song when I'm half asleep.
How do I manage to think about anything else? Quite a lot of the time, I don't think, I'm pretty stupid now, but if there is something to distract my brain and requires attention, the song fades. But as soon as things are quiet again, boom, there's a song playing. Usually with words relating to what just happened. If someone says the word "letter", the song playing at the back of my head will be They Might Be Giants: Letterbox. And later tonight, I'm going to a gig with Bombskare headlining, so at some point during the day, I'll be hearing their songs at the back of my head, well before I actually start playing them on my stereo.
Gray on 17/8/2019 at 19:25
Let me approach this from a different angle: I'm trying to figure out what music means to you, and how important it is. Is it important? Do you listen to any old random crap, or are you a proper music nerd and seek out very specific bands because you know they'll make you (briefly) happy? Do you even have a favourite band? A genre? Many genres? Any genre you can not stand for some reason, and if so, why?
CoffeeMaker on 18/8/2019 at 16:30
Music is sometimes everything to me. It's certainly a mood changer, which is important for me to remember as an option when it starts feeling to me like my day needs a reboot and it's too rainy to go for a walk and get some more oxygen into my brain, switch things up. I honestly think music saved my life more than a few times when I was mourning the loss of family and friends who died way too soon. I could not come to grips with my grief and spent too long even in the denial stage, but I needed to find a way to feel the pain and loss, because I knew feeling nothing was way too dangerous. Music put a reliable floor under me. A priest once counseled me that the only real sin is that of despair, since that one enables all the others. I believe that, and sought solace or even anger from music when I could not stop feeling I was heading towards unremitting despair.
As a kid I was exposed mostly to classical music including "contemporary" American and European composers of the 20th century, plus assorted kids of jazz that my dad liked. I studied piano, violin and cello from childhood on up into my 20s (the 1960s), and most of that was classical or jazz as well. So there are huge gaps in my sense of American pop and early rock music; a lot of it I have never filled in properly.
The Everly Brothers... Elvis... I think I remember them on Sullivan shows but I might be remembering much later references to them in mass media articles about the development of American pop/rock music. anyway pop music per se didn't make much of a connection.
Once I was out on my own and working, then when it wasn't about classical or jazz, I did get interested in rock, blues, assorted alternative and singer/songerwriter stuff, some alt-country but not country per se, a few hip hop tracks because I admire Lupe Fiasco's ability to talk in English faster than a Mexican radio ad reader on lunchtime shows back in my exchange student days in Mexico City... and a liking for traditional Mexican and other Latin pop probably hails from then too.
I'm the kind of person who doesn't think of requiem masses as gloomy, nor of Bach cantatas as sitting in church waiting for it to be over lol. I think of those works as architectural wonders, no less inspiring than the cathedrals in which they were meant to be played and sung. I could listen to Fauré's Op. 48 or the Brahms German Requiem all night.
By the same token --architecture, use of space and time-- I'm a huge fan of Bartok's six String Quartets. I think no more of putting them in a loop then of taking 15 or 20 U2 tracks I like and making a playlist of them to repeat while I go about straightening up my studio or cooking food on a weekend to freeze for use later in the week.
So again, music can be "everything" to me. Essential ingredient, background, learning opportunity. Every Friday night is jazz night for me, so that I don't forget to explore with the explorers. I use Spotify or Apple Music to prowl around and learn something new in a huge world that's just out there ready to inform and entertain. I like reading reviews and email briefs on new music. I love the random discovery of a reference to some music I don't know well in a novel or someone's biography or memoirs.
And I'm grateful for the internet making learning more about music a much more expansive opportunity than back when I was a youngster rummaging through boxes of stuff in grandma's attic and finding old concert programmes. I would sit there then imagining what it must have been like to hear a famous pianist show up in their small town for a recital in the 1920s. Maybe even one who had made a recording my grandparents might have let me listen to in their living room, where their humongous console record player was practically a shrine. WWII was on when I was that kid and the times were very different from the idyllic 20s and musicians touring the country to put on shows in small towns, but the dreams were still there, the record player still there, the piano and music stands for family members' musical instruments still there. So music was a kind of glue holding some things still for us while the newspapers were full of the chaos of another world war on the heels of the first one.
Heh, so much is different now. We can click on a link and "know everything" about a musician right down to the last time he was hauled into divorce court. I don't want to go backwards but I try not to let the internet's educational offerings distract me from what matters to me about music-making. The music... the music.. the music itself... and that spark of human creativity that both makes it and makes us want to hear it.
Gray on 19/8/2019 at 15:53
Interesting.
Yes, I know what you mean about us now having full access to all information all of the time. As a massive music nerd, I own thousands of CDs, but apart from the most famous bands, I have no idea of what most of their real names are or what they look like, there just was no information to be found that wasn't on the album sleeve. Sometimes they were mentioned in magazines, but mostly, just unverified rumours. As I got older I stopped caring about who those people are, and just focused on their music and what it means to me. My rock posters on walls ended in the 80s. I could walk past a guy in the street that I own 20 albums by and not recognise him, I'd probably just think those tattoos look stupid.
qolelis on 27/8/2019 at 10:56
For a long time as a kid, music meant nothing to me. I lived in my own silence. The wind in the trees and the birds sang to me. The sound of falling snow. My own thoughts hitting the ground. When music was played, I disliked it. Even the music targeted at me. Especially the music targeted at me. "Why are they acting like this?" I have always been bad at being a fan. It doesn't interest me. This is, partly, why I eventually got into making my own, but also before I discovered the good that was out there, which took a while. Maybe music meant everything to me all along. Now I listen all the time and go explore, just as I would the woods. The wind and the birds and the falling snow are still there, but so is also music. Dreaming it was a thing for a while, but those days are gone now.
Gray on 16/9/2019 at 04:37
It has been pointed out to me in another thread that maybe I'm weird because I hear music in my dreams. I often dream about songs, or fragments of songs, drifting in and out, depending on whatever other dreamy weirdness is going on. Surely, it can't just be me that hears music in dreams? Sometimes I even compose full songs while dreaming, and I'm struggling to remember the best bits as I wake up and write them down before I forget. Most of them turn out to be crap, but every now and then, some melody I come up with came to me in a dream, I just forgot what the context was, the chords, the structure, and I have to reinvent that, and it's never as good as it sounded when I was asleep. When I'm awake, I'm pretty good with drum machines, but less so with melody. When I'm asleep, it's all about melody, chords, building up drama, that I can never recreate later. I never dream about drum machines.
Sulphur on 16/9/2019 at 04:46
Depends on your criteria for weird. If weirdness is the factor of how uncommon something is to you vs. a population sample of this forum, you've got nothing to worry about.
For what it's worth, I don't have a musical bone in my body, but I sometimes wake up with a fucking orchestra playing in my head, sometimes a plain melody. I have no idea what to do with it, and by the time I've had a mug of coffee, there's only a whisper of what it was soughing in my head and the trees outside. You're not the only one.
Gray on 16/9/2019 at 05:56
It doesn't matter if you're musical or not, get Caustic for £6 and jot down your ideas quickly before they fade. It's a simple and quick tool, and you don't even have to know about music. I'd point to my own face, but that doesn't quite work in text.
Gray on 14/10/2019 at 16:30
Some music annoys me, and some does not, even though it might on the surface seem very similar. For example, I'm a huge fan of (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9BfvPjsXXw) Nine Inch Nails. I love emotional whiny noisy crap, and the oft-repeated silent-loud-silent-angry-shouting template. So why do I then dislike a band like (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXYiU_JCYtU) Linkin Park so much? The similarities are there. (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0DfD96OTOw) Eisbrecher are doing the same thing, and yet I absolutely love them. Why? I love Depeche Mode, and I tend to love (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LemUE8pdAZ8) Depeche Mode clone wannabe bands as well. Why does Linkin Park annoy me? Is it because the vocals sound like some whiny teen boyband and not like actual grownups? Perhaps just because I hate Justin Timberlake. Is it because it for some reason doesn't sound "genuine" to me, whatever that means? Or perhaps just because they were so much younger than I, and I'm just a grumpy old miserable bastard dismissing them as lame because I'm too old to get it? Very possibly either of those. But what
is "authentic"? I love The Monkees and many Motown acts, clearly factory made and mass produced, exactly like the boybands I hate. What's the difference? I love The Smiths, but if I had seen how prancy and annoying Morrissey was on stage before hearing them, I probably would have dismissed them outright and never bothered, thus missing out on some of the greatest songs in pop history. What else am I wrong about? What else have I missed, just from being a narrow-minded clueless fool? If I was more homophobic than I am, I might have missed out on (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_hU0-1wYwQ) Erasure and some truly great love songs. In fact, I'm pretty sure that almost 30% or more of my CD:s are very gay in ways I'm too thick to realise, but I don't care, as long as it appeals to my ears, my feet or my soul. Sometimes all three, like with (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk4gZEAmOLk) VNV. Sounds very gay but I can relate on every level and absolutely love it.
I guess my point is this: musical taste. What is it? I know what I love, and I know what I hate, and the stuff I hate seems to be everywhere. The stuff I love is harder to find, but once you find it, it's all the more rewarding. And when you find a kindred spirit who likes the same crap you do, you somehow instantly bond. Why is that? Because you feel some kind of soul connection? "We get stuff that others don't see"?
Questions, questions. Yes, I think about music a lot. Often while listening to it, but probably more when I'm not. Thoughts?
[Edit]
Just to clarify, it's not a binary question. There's a lot of music I'm largely indifferent to. Some I like a bit, some I'm not too into, but don't actively hate. Just thought I'd add that for balance. Despite my very grumpy nature, when it comes to music, I'm quite open and accepting, unless it's directly awful. But then again, what is "awful"?
[Edit again]
The main reason I reposted in this thread is because I saw the Netflix show
Explained, the
Music episode, where they questioned what music is, why and how it affects us. Watch it if you can. It made me think. I'm now more full of questions than ever. I'm not necessarily looking for answers, just opinions and viewpoints. Any wildly crazy ideas or wrong opinions are welcome, as long as you can motivate your stance.
icemann on 14/10/2019 at 23:54
Well N.I.N and Linkin Park are completely different in sound. A lot of N.I.N's early stuff has a very machine-like feel to it (and went onto inspire a fair bit of the music in System Shock 1). Linkin Park is far more pop.