Songs and how they ruin me.
Last year, I listened to Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality at least 150 times. I say “at least” because I started keeping track when I noticed that I was listening to the album two or three times a day some days, then lost track when I accepted that the album, as it was in years past and will be in years future, was the star by which I navigated my life. There are other Sabbath records, maybe better Sabbath records, but none which better adapt to the texture of my emotions. So I listen to it, over and over again, hoping to better understand it and better understand myself at the same time.
It will (probably) take awhile before I’m ready to write about Black Sabbath, but how I listen to Master of Reality is how I listen to other albums. The year that Prince died, I listened to Purple Rain until it felt like Purple Rain was the rhythm my entire life moved to. I took up occupancy in that album, listened to it until I was hearing new things, listened to confirm those new things, listened to integrate those new things into my understanding of Prince as a musician, and so on and so on. I’ve got the album right now and am particularly taken by the strum pattern before the first of “Take Me With U,” which is later echoed by the violin. I’m sure I’ve heard it before, but it’s so small, the guitar so quiet in the mix, that I don’t remember feeling it like I’m feeling it right now.
I don’t know if “songs and how they ruin me” is an accurate description of what I’ll be writing about here, as my relationship to music has been changed due to the fact that I do the ordering for a record store, and because very few things ruin me like “Children of the Grave” or the way Prince’s voice tears itself to shreds at the end of “The Beautiful Ones.” For my sake and yours, I’ll be focusing on individual songs, bouncing back and forth between older and more recent music. I used to be able to speak music pretty well, but given that I stopped playing/learning around the same time as I started drinking, I’ve lost the technical language the same way I lost the ability to speak Latin. So don’t expect anything technical or overly critical. There’s enough of that in the world already, by people who know what they’re talking about. I just want to put on a pair of headphones and feel feelings. Let’s do it.
NEXT: “Body Language” by Queen, from the album Hot Space.