[September 2024]
Using words to convey an experience is difficult. You heard [OK Computer] in middle school but quickly put it down (what was their deal? Subterranean homesick aliens? A German car crash? Motorways and crushed bugs?).
Poetry birthed metaphor and simile, empowering the subtle and implicit. At some point, we realized getting a point across didn't have to be the sole goal of writing, and ever since then we've been finding new ways to write freedom. Maya Angelou wrote about caged birds and Louis Armstrong wrote about bruised skin.
And you'd never faced segregation, nor really understood jazz, but you knew what it felt like to be suffocated or hurt, and that was it. Then you understood someone else's words. Then [OK Computer] made sense, but not because you pictured a subterranean homesick alien or a German car crash any differently, but because they meant something different to you.
The difficulty of songwriting often lies in treading the boundary between event and experience; one particularly speaks to a memory, the other, a feeling. I don't think moments unite us; feelings do. I believe that conveying an experience is more meaningful, more personal, because it abstracts a story into a fundamental human familiarity. In that sense, we relate to something uniquely human, because maybe you never lost a loved one or been through heartbreak but you've sure as hell felt lonely. Sometime, somewhere.
So when someone wrote about that loneliness it resonated with you. And then you felt like that subterranean homesick alien. Secretive; uptight; strange.
Interestingly, revisiting a meaningful song evolves over time, even though the one-sided conversation remains the same. Rather... it's an unchanged dialogue approaching new ears. Perhaps you overcame loneliness or fell greater victim to it—in any case, your relationship with a song transforms with you, even if every chord, passage, and lyric didn't.
Using words to convey an experience is difficult. Artists have the weight of their listeners on their shoulders (is this a fair obligation?), but I think there's something comforting about creating artwork you know will reach someone. It's a compelling artist-listener relationship, one that's separated by a digital wall so each can understand one another without having to face one another. We need this art, this thoughtful, meaningful, impactful art, woven in experience and emotion, so we can continue to create timeless music.
Your experiences are carefully & gently handled by your favorite songwriters, and for that, you owe them your ears.
[ref. → (OK Computer, by Radiohead), (What's Going On, by Marvin Gaye), (Javelin, by Sufjan Stevens), (songs, by Adrianne Lenker)].