Listening to music has always been sacred to me.
I can’t remember the moment my relationship with music shifted from casual enjoyment to all-consuming fascination, but one day I stopped buying Star Wars action figures with my spare change and started saving up for CD’s. My great grandpa paid my brother and me to mow his lawn once a week in the summer, and those earnings were judiciously budgeted into one of three main categories: video games, 99 cent cans of Arizona iced tea, and music.
Before I started using iTunes, I was enamored with the compact disc, that shining, fragile relic of yesteryear. Buying CD’s became a religious experience for me. I would drive to the record store (praying they had a copy of the album I wanted) and glide through the automatic sliding doors like a bird of prey. Upon spying the coveted title, I would swoop down and snatch the CD off the rack with acrobatic dexterity, hurl a $10 bill at the disgruntled cashier, and make a beeline for my 1999 Ford Ranger, finishing with a triple aerial backflip over a moving SUV. After a brief nod of acknowledgement to applauding bystanders, I would duck into the vehicle and struggle with that impenetrable plastic wrapping for 15 minutes. At long last, I would hold up the shining disc in victory and stuff it (with conviction) into the CD player.
And then that holy moment of silence and rapt anticipation before the first notes.
It’s hard to articulate just how important music was to me in those formative years. It gave me permission to reckon with my emotions. It was how I processed the world around me and my place in it. Music was meaning making; it breathed some semblance of order into the chaos of life. When I feel nostalgic, I find myself reaching for my CD collection, sifting through those treasured stacks like I’m looking for some old photograph, weathered and worn by years of devotion. They’re my mile markers.
To this day, I find myself driving to the record store after a particularly exhausting day, almost ritualistically. As I wander through labyrinthine shelves of technicolor jewel cases and vinyl sleeves, I sometimes wonder what it is I’m still searching for. What draws me to music? After all, in the words of Tom Waits, “Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing with the air.” Vibrations and frequencies and pressure, pounding out of speakers and into our ears and chests.
I’ve always thought that something holy happens at concerts. I saw Julien Baker perform last year and it was one of the most sacred experiences of my life. It was also the quietest show I’ve ever been to; the crowd looked on in something like reverence, a rare moment of respite in a breakneck world. When I was moved to tears, I looked around to see several other attendees crying in the dimly lit theater. Sometimes the audience would be swept up in the experience and quietly sing along for a stretch. One such moment occurred during a song called “Everybody Does,” in which Julien sings, “You’re gonna run when you find out who I am / You’re gonna run, it’s alright, everybody does.” I’ll never forget that she cracked a smile when the audience sang those words back at her. Such beautiful irony. It’s so good to be proved wrong sometimes; to learn that we’re not unlovable, to awake to the fact that we’re not so alone after all. The sense of belonging and solidarity was palpable in the room. The Fox Theater in Boulder, Colorado became a cathedral that night.
We create and perform songs for the same reason we seek them out: connection. Community. That’s why I find myself driving to the record store after a tough day at work. That’s why I write songs. It’s like setting off a signal flare to see if anyone else is lost in the wilderness. It’s hurling a life preserver from the stern of a sinking ship. It’s an attempt to understand and be understood.
That’s really what I’m looking for when I’m waist deep in piles of dusty old records. And when I find it, I’m overcome with that feeling of smallness I get when I gaze into a starry sky. It’s peeking through a window into something sublime and infinite and other. And when I catch a glimpse of whatever that is, I’m reminded that we’re not all that different.
And that’s why I’m starting this blog. It’s an invitation to conversations about humanity, culture, and the transcendent, all through the lens of song. It’s some small attempt to talk about the experiences and art that bring us together. It’s a celebration of moonlit summer drives and reading lyric booklets by lamplight until everyone in the house is asleep but you. It’s a place to encourage guileless enjoyment of so-called “guilty pleasure albums.” It’s an effort to view music as a gift instead of a product for consumption or cold analysis. It’s not that there isn’t value in art criticism. This just isn’t the place for it. This is a place for celebration and meditation and maybe even a little bit of dancing.
It’s okay to want to dance. In fact, it’s more than okay. Let it happen.
All Oceans Ink 
Best wishes on your latest journey!
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Well worded good thoughts….would be good to tease out why you think the moment was “holy” rather than special, amazing, awesome, incredible, or ? Is it the attempt to understand and be understood, which at a max level only God can achieve? Is it the holy in the silence and anticipation of experiencing the creative new thing that might bring more insight? Is the concert transforming a theater to a cathedral with “the sense of belonging and solidarity” not also brought about by a well done movie or play or poetry reading in that building on other nights? I have been at some concerts where the music was powerful and the stage show flashy and unique but the events of the place were anything but “holy” in a religious or Scriptural use sense and the lyrics bordered on horror or blasphemy. Looking forward to more of your thoughts and responses…as we music is a wonderful gift to humanity and the world. Your gifts in music are incredible and your performances are a gift as well. Blessings.
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Hi, Dr. Black! These are some wonderful and tough questions, and I’ll do my best to respond while acknowledging the fact that I’ll forever be out of my league when talking about this kind of thing. 🙂
I would qualify my thoughts by saying that I have also been to concerts that were spectacular but unholy, the same way I have seen several movies that have been artfully crafted but seemed destructive or nihilistic at best. It is a temptation for humans to conflate exhilarating or emotionally elevated experiences with holy ones (which can also happen in worship services), but that is not what I’m talking about here. The sense of belong/understanding and the anticipation of new insight are both factors that contribute to the holiness of the kinds of sacred moments in question, but I think the net can be cast wider yet. My understanding is that an encounter with the good, the true, and the beautiful is an encounter with God, in some sense. If a moment is any of those three things, it belongs to God; I don’t think it can come from anywhere/anyone else. I think God can reveal himself through art in this way and often does, whether or not the artist acknowledges him as the true source. I have often heard folks who don’t identify with any kind of religion say that they’ve had what felt like sacred experiences at concerts or while listening to or performing music, reading books or poetry, watching a play, etc., which makes me wonder what is going on there. It’s so fascinating that art can make a nonreligious person say, “That felt spiritual to me.” As far as lyrics that seem unholy, I think a lot of that stuff really is meaningless garbage, but not all of it; I would contend that the Bible is also full of horrifying and violent stories. But the dark parts of the Bible serve a purpose in the greater story and trajectory of redemption. It seems the dark parts of art can function in a similar way, so long as they’re deftly handled and point towards hope and love and reconciliation. I think telling our human stories with integrity often requires us to talk about difficult things. Of course, engaging with art must always be approached with a great deal of discernment, and that doesn’t give creators license to be shocking or provocative for the sake of spectacle.
This project is all about trying to attribute moments of transcendence to their true source, and I think this C. S. Lewis quote sums it up more more beautifully than I could: “The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
Thank you so much for reading and for your thoughtful engagement and kind words. I value your wisdom and insight greatly, and I’d love to speak with you more about this stuff. Hope you are well!
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I too would agree with your thought “My understanding is that an encounter with the good, the true, and the beautiful is an encounter with God, in some sense.” We could add an encounter with love, intimacy, creativity friendship are also an encounter with God, in some sense. I desire for all of us who are people striving to grow in these vital things to have a greater awareness of the God who is there. Janet and I are well and grateful to God for so many things including the joy of relationships with so many wonderful people. Blessings.
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NIck:
This is well said. For a while recently I was collecting snatches of lyrics that seemed to some up my feeling for that day–or moment. Never quite knew what to do with them. Maybe collecting them was enough.
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