Brief Thoughts on Music, and Why We Love It

I drove to work today, instead of taking the train. Partly because I wanted to be more in control of my traveling. Partly because I wanted to hear music. Lately, I’ve been wanting to write a poem that captures the essence of the morning – that sensation where the coffee’s just started to kick in, a great song comes on the radio, traffic falls away, and the sun is shining strong and constant overhead. At times like this in the morning, everything seems possible and the world seems full of hope and good intentions.

This morning, however, I heard all the wrong love songs. And that small, 2% of truth in them made me sad and depressed and lonely.

Then, I began thinking about why songs affect us the way they do. And why we look to songs much like prescription medication – looking to illicit a particular response/feeling on demand.

My theory is that we all secretly are composing our own soundtracks. Deep down, the movies have ingrained themselves so deeply in our psyches, we want to create a soundtrack for our lives, in the hopes of making our real lives more like the imagined lives we see in theaters.