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unheard
September 29, 2005
so, here's the latest revelation: no matter how much i can understand the language of music, i can't speak it. i can fake it well enough, my knowledge of the sound and rhythms, even the vocabulary, making me a superior faker. but i don't know enough of the grammar.
i spent the weekend at acl fest, which only reinforced the heart-wrenching, almost self-destructive desire to create. lately, i've listened to so much incredible music, a lot of aimee mann and death cab for cutie and the mars volta. i wanted to turn my increasingly redundant writing towards the lyrical, wanted to write something as beautiful as the things i've heard.
i stayed home from work monday, pre-planned, and i sat, finally, at the keyboard. i know the sounds. i can bang out a chord, and find a limited number of chords that work with it, a progression that is right. but as much as i can genuinely rend expression and tone and dynamic to my playing, the melody and structure itself don't come from my heart. i'm just playing with the handful of useful phrases i know, ladening them with the emphasis and intonation of emotion, but they still come up short. it's not the music that i love. it's nothing i feel worth attaching my words to.
so the keyboard is for sale. i could learn to play. but i'd be doing so now, at 36, amidst everything else i've taken on. i still believe in my ability to write words that can take a life of their own, even in music, and mean something. i believe in my voice - still, only a handful of people have really heard what it can do. maybe only some high school kids in a small audition room, with one guy playing a peter gabriel song on guitar, and me losing all inhibition and fear and finally singing out.
but the keyboard is not the path. i can do other things with the money. i might get another someday, when i have the time and money to devote to the lessons and practice that will make me fluent in that language.
it makes me sadder than you might imagine. true love, for me, has only been marked by its congruence with music. it is the one constant, from my earliest memory, stretching into my future.
right now, music is like some beautiful woman i've gotten to know, come to love, can understand perfectly, but ultimately, can't talk to. i can't speak her language, can't tell my story to, or release my heart to in any way that she'd understand. it's just another sort of loneliness, just another failure on the ever-growing pile.
but i'll find other ways.
Posted by Rob at September 29, 2005 10:44 PM