Intro Post
The first time I encountered words that I felt actually meant something personal to me was the memorization of “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock,” which I recited in 8th grade. In the weeks leading up to the deadline, I found myself fumbling over the words and drawing blanks in the order of lines. I tried reading it over and over until it stuck in my head, hoping to remember the sounds each word made, but what finally allowed me to imprint the poem on my brain was its significance. These were not just sounds I could pronounce phonetically — they were a lament. “Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” While my eighth-grade brain might not have fully grasped what T.S. Eliot meant by comparing the sky to an anesthetized patient,the clear emotion that the words evoke was enough for me to remember the line. The poem tells a story of nostalgia and regret and the different stresses we feel as we move through life, and this idea that careful attention to small bits of language can build emotion and add up to a larger story captivated me then.
It captivates me now, too, as I obsess over the intricacies of song lyrics and musical production. I enjoy reading Hozier’s lyrics and feeling satisfaction when I find another double entendre he has hidden within the song or looking at the lyrics to “American Teenager” by Ethel Cain and realizing the irony of how the words undermine the melody. I love talking about these small things I find within songs to my friends, easily constructing my arguments to make them agree. But, what I find more challenging is the ability to describe the emotion that songs evoke for me.
This realization is why I started writing this blog. It’s pointless to simply tell someone what they should feel when they hear a song — we all interact with music in different ways, anyway. But we can still share the experience of listening to a song together, and that’s what I hope this blog will do: give us the time to slow down, think about art, and deconstruct why a certain song makes us feel the way it does or lodges in our brain, inextricable from a particular memory. These essays are my coping mechanism and my outlet to express how music makes me feel empowered, helps me through heartbreak, or uncovers a new part of myself I didn’t know existed. In the future, for example, when I hear Chappel Roan’s “Good Luck Babe,” I might think of dancing next to my best friends at Lollapalooza, or I might think of what it was like when I was 16, sat down at this computer, and started to write.
