This is how I love music.

I know better than to bring music up on a first date. Not because I think its inappropriate dinner conversation, but rather, because I am too opinionated for my own good. I'm not one of those people who lists "I listen to everything" on their MySpace or Facebook page because I listen to Kiss FM. When people ask me what I like I certainly don't answer "everything but country;" No, I provide people with more detail than they could have possibly hoped for when it comes to my taste in music. Occassionally, I will give a vague or general answer like "I like Jazz, Rock and the things that fall in between." But that usually causes people to ask me more questions. Which I answer. In great detail. Once, on a date, a guy mentioned that he was a Jazz guy, which delighted me. I started spewing information at him about local trio's and jazz bars, brilliant recordings from the 60's and excellent covers of Standards. He looked at me like a deer in the headlights. Apparently, not quite as Jazzy as I had hoped. Apparently his version of being a Jazz fan was a couple of Dave Brubeck albums and a copy of "In the wee small hours of the morning" by Frank Sinatra, all of which are brilliant, but they were'nt quite what I had anticipated.


I love finding "new" music. I love the idea that I might have helped someone find a new favorite song or band. I love knowing songs before they come on the radio or pop up on my "Just for You" on iTunes. My brother is the same way, but we NEVER agree on music. He covers Rap, Hip Hop, R&B while I cover Jazz, Rock, Blues, Folk and Pop. The only things we agree on are songs that we grew up listening to together. By the likes of Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Bach, Michael Jackson, Earth Wind and Fire and The Who. He loves beats and I love Melodies, I love lyrics and he loves stories. So this is going to be my feeble attempt to explain why and how I love music even though I can't play or sing to save my life.


I love the way it makes me feel. I love how it makes me think. I love that it is a combination of various forms of art, layered together for my listening pleasure. I always in the mood to listen to, think about or talk about music. I love the way that genres overlap and the fact that a group of four kids from Liverpool can change the world forever. Even as I run without an iPod, I have a song in my head and I play it over and over and over again. (Lately that song has been "To the beat of our noisy hearts" by Matt Nathanson.) I develop crushes on musicians not for their fame or their looks, but for the way they play, sing or write. The way BB King and Muddy Waters make a guitar sing, the way John Mayer spills his soul and the way Frank Sinatra Crooned. I adore the darkness in Johnny Cash's voice. I cherish the music that my friends make and hold them in exceptionally high esteem. I love songs of unrequited love and vicious indiscretion. I adore the subtle and the brutally obvious lyrics of Adam Levine. I long for infectious melodies and loathe the constructed pop of the late 90's. I live for the chills that you get the first time you see a song you really love performed live. I admire modern interpretations of older songs and I am delighted with those who play tribute to the people who have inspired them over the course of time.

I remember the first time I walked into Amoeba Records on Sunset, I thought to myself, Wow, so this is what a music store is supposed to be like. I had gone in for a copy of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and I came out with a total of 6 albums, which seems to be a problem that I regularly have in music stores. The difference that time, was that it had taken me an hour and a half. I zigged and zagged through the ailes flicking through CD's by artists I had never heard of. I found albums from my youth that I had long since forgotten and I realized, that there would always be more music for me to find and more for me to love.


Music is my best romance, my constant companion, my favorite kind of discovery and the key to all of my emotions. At this moment in time, its the closest thing I've got to religion.