A History in Music

A History in Music

What if the songs we hear become pieces of us?

When we love them hard enough, notes become dislodged, float

inside our bodies and stick in our

hearts or lungs, we

embody those notes and each time we hear the song again it's like

a puzzle finding it's missing piece: something we

didn't know we were missing snaps

into place and for that 3 minutes and 29 seconds we

are something like complete.

This

is for the notes

of every song I've ever sung that are

waiting to be breathed again;

and this is for all the notes still waiting out

in the beautiful not yet.

It's bedtime and I am 5 years old.

My sister and I go into our bedroom and switch out the cassette from the tape player

exchanging soothing ocean sounds for Disney's Greatest Hits.

Dad comes in, says goodnight, turns out the light, presses "play" and "The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers" fills the bedroom as my sister and I howl with laughter, hopping in our beds. 

There were no ocean sounds in our bedroom that night,

but at 5, music filled my body with wiggles I could not suppress.

I'm 8 and have discovered my father's record collection.

In the basement, my sister and I don fancy dress-up clothes and turn on Jim Croce's

"Bad Bad Leroy Brown" while flipping our skirts and dancing wildly around the floor. 

In that moment, I felt myself simultaneously beautiful and talented and also

hilarious and a little naughty dancing to this song I did not understand.

At 11, I was practically a piano virtuoso...according to me.  I played

and played and played those songs until I never had to open a book.

I lost myself in the embodying of those notes, played them again and

again until my mother would yell, "Give it a rest, Laur,"

and I would slink to my bedroom.

I have always been a poet.  I want the lyrics

to wrap themselves around me: as a teenager, I would crawl inside

and find myself a home inside the words. I left

pieces of history in those songs that still smell like

summer camp, swimming pools, dressing rooms, college dorms,

car trips, alcohol, and regret. 

Large pieces of me can be found on CDs I burned and listened to until

their rhythm became the pace of my day.

This is for the music of the not yet.

For the love and laughter, grief and heartache

waiting to be heard, to be sung, to be played

until everyone around me begs me to

give it a rest.

This is for knowing the world in us as the only song.

For the music of magic creating vast vibration of

beautiful in us; this is for the songs we sing off-key in our kitchen.

For the lyrics we remember wrong - or never hear right.

For the ones that speak to our souls and never leave us.

This is for the music we make

with our tongues, our feet, our hands,

for the beat of our hearts keeping time with our

rests, our melodies, our

cacophonies of words we try to smooth like symphonies:

you untamed, wild song.

Hold the microphone of your life to your lips that we

may ever hear your vital blossoming of lyric, you

unfolding explosion; let us

breathe our harmonies into your bloodstream --

listen...

can you hear it?

This

is the sound of the world in us.

It is the song of all the music that is

living in you.  It is

the harmony of all the songs

you have not yet sung.