Under your Bones Layers. I have always been a gal that liked to dissect the harmonic and rhythmic patterns in music. It has only been in the last couple of years that I became interested in the way these layers seep into our spiritual beings. Our memories, moods, colors become part of who we are. You know the reason you and Emily have that ONE song that is yours. Let me break it down this way: music, songs, melodies, that line that just *killed* you when you heard it play over the movie theatre in surround sound about 'beauty being in the breakdown' - whatever it is in music that grabs you. It takes hold of that part of you that hangs on to a vision of yourself that you have lived or will live or might never live. That doesn't mean it isn't real – music is the portal that makes it real at the time you’re listening, the string that connects your spirit to that 'whatever-it-is.’ Certain music has always had strong powers over me, but I never really analyzed where the powers went. Up? In? I didn't know why Benjamin Britten's “Rejoice in the Lamb” spoke into me at a certain time in my life about the specifics of what was going on. I was touring and never seeing Ken. Ken was touring and never seeing me. The only time we saw each other for over a year was the two and three week sprints of recording On Your Shore and In Parentheses. He was busy with his band, and it was just all business. There was a lot of stress, I remember, and I missed him, but you know how you can miss someone so long that it just seems to be a normal, natural thing. The ache is replaced by a knowing that it is just going to hurt no matter how many glasses of wine you drink or how many text messages you send a day. I remember listening to the 'Hallelujah' section of this piece on my ipod, and it ripped me apart right in the SUV in front of Kim (my tour manager)…and just sobbing. Mind you, it's not much more than a minute long, so why? For the rest of my life, the 'Hallelujah' from 'Rejoice in the Lamb' will be forever attached to the Interstate 95 and that ache. My whole question as to why this happens comes up again in the song “Veins” a couple of years later. I'm not ready to discuss the extra dimensions of the cosmos that play music because that's for my next album. In any case, how each of us processes music at a particular slice of our life is a unique travel. A certain someone's voice, melody, lyric reaches into all of our spirits differently, under our bones, and we take something with us that is only ours because it is our unique spirit that processes it, remembers it, cries with it, and lives with it. Sometimes it's conscious, sometimes it's not and it hits you later. Once we have that love with a song or piece, we must surrender to it and sink into it freely as we let it fill us with memories, his face, her face, places. It now becomes possible that I can be in 50 million places at once because my mind is in connection with my spirit and the catalyst is 'I think it's dark and it looks like rain you said' (The Cure, “Plainsong”). And forever I will be in these places...766 with Raven in college, holding on for dear life as I get cheated on by my first boyfriend, and walking down the aisle to marry Ken. This song expels a warmth even though it can also blanket me with a severe depression. The power it has. Nietzsche said that "without music life would be a mistake,” and so it would be. Hang on when it grabs that inner part of you that know one knows but you and the music, of course. And go deep.
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