The Music in Me

I just finished a book by Jeff Tweedy, the frontman and founder of the rock band Wilco. It’s called World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music. Whether or not you’re into or have heard of Wilco, if you love music of any genre, it’s worth a read.

Tweedy walks through about 50 songs across the spectrum of music and discusses how each song helped shape his life and identity as an artist. He talks about: “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” “You Are My Sunshine,” “Smoke on the Water,” “Ramblin Man,” “Free Bird,” and even “The Star Spangled Banner” and “Happy Birthday,” among many others.

The book got me thinking about how music has impacted my life, which it has deeply, for decades. 

I think my love for music originated with my dad, who loved to sing. His favorites were “Danny Boy” and “A Capital Ship,” which is described on the internet as “a maritime-themed 1885 song based on a nonsense children’s poem by Charles Edward Carryl.” I’m pretty sure my dad learned it from his father, who was in the U.S. Navy and circumnavigated the globe in Teddy Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet. I can still remember most of the lyrics to both songs, a function of singing them hundreds of times with my dad.

Music only grew from there as an influence in my life, with specific songs and albums marking major inflection points in time. I remember the first time I heard R.E.M.’s debut album, Murmur, in 1983. The album had just been released and I only knew about it from a review in Rolling Stone Magazine, as it received zero radio play outside of small, indie stations. I was 17 at the time, a pretty formative point in my life. I bought it on cassette so I could listen to it in my sister’s hand-me-down VW and popped it into the deck while still in the parking lot of the record store. The album’s opener, “Radio Free Europe,” bounded out of my cheap, tinny speakers with an explosive four-beat drum intro that segued into jangling guitars and Michael Stipe’s completely unintelligible vocals, more instrument than words.

It was absolutely alien to me, unlike anything I had ever heard, and I was smitten. It changed everything I thought about modern music and set me on a life-long exploration of music that’s unabated today. I once had the good fortune to run into Mike Mills, R.E.M.’s bass player, in an airport, and we talked for quite some time. I had the pleasure of telling one of my idols that his music changed my life, and his appreciation was sincere. An amazing moment I’ll never forget.

Music keeps interrupting and shaping my life in good ways and sometimes sad ways.

In the early days of my wife’s cancer diagnosis in 2018, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s “If We Were Vampires” was getting heavy rotation on the satellite radio station I listen to most. It’s a song about two lovers coming to the realization that one will outlive the other and how they wish they could live on together forever like vampires might. Clever concept. Beautiful song.

I was spending a lot of time driving to and from the hospital, and it was as if the song was written for me. It was actually weird and moving how relevant it was at that point in my life. One lyric in particular always floored me:

Maybe time running out is a gift

I'll work hard 'til the end of my shift

And give you every second I can find

And hope it isn't me who's left behind

It's knowing that this can't go on forever

Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone

Maybe we'll get forty years together

But one day I'll be gone

Or one day you'll be gone

The more I listened to the song, which was a lot those days, the more my emotion shifted from sadness and self-pity to the realization that this is just life, and I’m not alone in what I’m feeling and experiencing.

Music can do that, if you do more than just listen to it... if you let it talk to you.

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I attended a concert by Dead and Company, the offshoot of the Grateful Dead, featuring a few of the original band members, augmented by John Mayer’s guitar and vocal virtuosity. We saw it at Sphere, the insanely teched-out new venue in Las Vegas. The entire exterior and most of the interior is one giant LED screen and the graphics and effects synchronized to the music were mesmerizing and at times, mind-blowing. You can check out videos on YouTube, but they don’t do the experience justice.

The second song was the iconic “Franklin’s Tower,” and as it opened, the entire arena was transformed into the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, where the Grateful Dead started in the mid-60s. As the song progressed, with the help of those mind-blowing effects, the entire audience of nearly 20,000 simultaneously “lifted” above the neighborhood, over the San Francisco skyline, over the Pacific Ocean and literally high enough into space to see the curvature of the earth, while all of us joined together to dance and sing the chorus over and over... Roll away the dew.

Not only was it the most spectacular ten minutes of live music I’ve ever experienced, it was one of those rare (these days) moments of mass unity, where all 20,000 of us left the earth and all its woes and together got lost in the beauty of the music. I get goosebumps thinking about it still.

The next day, we had lunch with a friend and her 21-year-old grandson, both who had been at the same show, had seen Dead and Company the prior night, and were going again that night. Yes, our friend is a die-hard Deadhead. After seeing them for the first time in San Francisco in 1971, she has seen them more than 300 times since. It was actually really cool that three generations of us were breaking bread and talking about a band that we all love.

When we got back to our hotel room later that afternoon, the airwaves were filled with news of the assassination attempt on President Trump at his Butler, Pennsylvania, rally just hours before. It was a jarring juxtaposition to the night before.

Our reverie, and in some ways the soul of the country, regardless of your political leaning, was shattered.

I honestly don’t know what all this means for our future as a country and if it’s at all possible for us to put our divisions aside to find the elements of common purpose and belief that surely exist among us. 

Oddly, looking back through the Jeff Tweedy book, I stumbled across a brief passage I had highlighted that might offer some broader insight into our current context. In it, he reflects on the ABBA song “Dancing Queen,” how much he hated the song for most of his life, and how much he regrets that hate now. He says he listens to “Dancing Queen” often these days to make up for his “lost spins” over the years. Tweedy writes: “I truly recommend spending some time looking for a song you might have unfairly maligned. It feels good to stop hating something. Music is a good place to start if you’re interested in forgiveness. For yourself, mostly, I assume. Because records can’t really change much over time, but we sure can, and do. Better late than never.