[size=medium]Music is the soundtrack of your life - at least it has been for mine. I first became aware of what music can do when I fell in love with the soundtrack for Star Wars the year it came out. I think I was around 9 years old when I asked my parents to buy the double LP album for me. I spent hours re-enacting scenes from the movie with the soundtrack playing away loudly on a very cheap portable record player. From that time on I was hooked and music was no longer something in the background, it accompanied me and was an integral aspect of any experience I had that could be combined with music. I can remember playing the drums to the Chain by Fleetwood Mac with pencils as my sticks, and pillows as my drum set.[/size]
[size=medium]Music was just so engaging that I became lost in, but it never dominated my experiences it just became part of them. As a teenager my father purchased some really decent audio components and my brother and I began to really embrace music. We both reveled in discovering new bands and music and would talk about music with anybody who would listen. We moved from the city into a small town and quickly became the guys who made mixed tapes for all of our friends. Music was so important that we tried to share our love of it with everybody. In the early 80s my brother purchased a pair of really nice Sony headphones launching my lifelong love of this enclosed experience. We had a few friends who would spend hours with us taking turns listening to the headphones.[/size]
[size=medium]My brother and I moved back into the city together sharing an apartment together. As always, we entertained and as always, music was always hugely important to us. Days before any gathering we would purchase blank tapes and plan our mixes. I would design the music based on the point in the evening at which it would be played. For both my brother and I, we would revel as we watched people really reacting to the atmosphere that the music created. Our friends would give us high-fives and shout with enthusiasm when killer tune after tune was blended into the night. After almost every party we would give away our mixes to friends so that they could continue to enjoy the music in their lives. We had hundreds of CDs and records from which to make mixes and friends would often “commission” us to make mixes for their parties. Some of our oldest friends still keep some of these mixes and when we get together they will take them out to show us that they kept them.[/size]
[size=medium]We didn’t do this to make people like what we liked, or to impress people, we just loved music so much for everything it could do that we had to share it. Nothing has changed. Today when we have company there will always be music in the air, now perhaps it will be jazz or world music where once it was Black Sabbath and Motley Crue and I still give away my mixes to friends. I can’t explain how or why music affects me so much, I’m just glad it does. My 6 year old daughter has been brought up around my very diverse musical taste and has turned into a gifted little musician already. Music helped me make friends; it helped me find myself when things were complicated and I had no idea what the heck was going on. If I was alone and bumming there was always something to experience in music, always something I could learn by listening to the words and emotions that artists shared through their music. When my wife was in the hospital I was bussing back and forth from our home listening to my iPod. Those wonderful emotions that can only be experienced when you are awaiting the first time you will see your child can be recalled so vividly whenever I play this mix, which I saved of course. Only music can take you back in time so profoundly.[/size]
[size=11pt]As I became more aware of political and social struggles music became a vehicle by which I could connect with what other people were experiencing. When I think about the civil rights struggle in the US I can hear the early forms of jazz and blues and I will find myself enveloped in the sadness and hope that emanated from much of the work. Music has always been, and will always be for me a conduit to experience and feeling. Music is art, music is history, music is people. I owe much of who I think I am to music and I will always cherish music.[/size]
