Listen to the Music.
Music: my escape route, my knight in shining armor, my companion. It’s something I can always turn to; something that I know will forever be a part of my life in some way or another. “The odd thing about music is that we understand and respond to it without actually having to learn it” (Ackerman 205). Although I can’t play any instruments myself, listening to the sound of other people creating melodies that help people get through their lives peacefully is absolutely amazing to me. Music, to me, is a way to get away from everything. When I feel as if too much is going on in my life, I turn on my music and sink into the deep sea of sound. When I feel as though life could not get any better, I play my most upbeat music, and do the same. No matter what type of mood I’m in, I know that I can always turn on my music and a world of emotions will come swarming into my soul. “Every individual, even the most unmusical, is likely to be touched by music if they choose the right song” (Isaacson).
What is the right song anyway? When somebody asks me what my favorite song is, my answer is given in either complete silence or I rattle off the name of a song that I will probably only like for two days, before moving onto something new. I have favorite songs for different parts of my life, such as my depressed middle school days or a song from the cd I listened to most during my favorite summer. When I’m missing parts of those times or people from that period, I dig through my cd collection and find the songs that remind me most of who or what I’m thinking of. When I travel home from school for vacations, I listen to music and sing my heart out during my three hour drive. My emotions for those three hours are completely ridiculous, in the way that I have never been happier or sadder in my life. It’s as though the music is actually the being that is having these feelings. As Trivedi stated “In hearing the music, we make-believably bring it to life and imagine that it is the very being whose emotion is being expressed, so that it seems as if it is the music itself that is sad or joyous.” I listen to the widest range of music; some of it making me cry tears of joy, others making me shed tears of sorrow. “A musical passage can make us cry, or send our blood pressure soaring” (Ackerman 207).
When I went to the Vans Warped Tour this past summer, never in my life have I been filled with so much powerful energy. When I heard one of my favorite bands, The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, play before me, my heart filled with so much excitement and joy that I really thought I was going to burst into tears. The energy they emitted from the stage made every fan in the audience pause, before beginning to thrash their bodies in the sea of people. When I heard them play, I thought of everything that their songs have ever helped me through or made me think of. I felt like I was part of the actual band; living my dream and putting my heart out there for the world to see. “Like pure emotions, music surges and sighs, rampages or grows quiet, and it behaves so much like our emotions it seems often to symbolize them, to mirror them, to communicate them to others, and thus frees us from the elaborate nuisance and inaccuracy of the words” (Ackerman 206, 207). Music is one crazy roller coaster of emotions; the words and sounds make me lose my mind in the crazy chaos of the world.
Music is my therapy; It helps me through the bad times I have, and helps me to realize how good my life truly is when I need to hear it the most. Music is something that has always been a part of my life and always will be. Whether I hear the sounds of my favorite bands live or hear them from a recording, the messages that they send out are going to be instilled in my soul everytime I listen to them. I feel as though music is something that has and always will help me to find out who I truly am in life. In a world so large and confusing, I know that the sounds of music will always be there to guide me through my life.
