Soundtrack To Your Life
5
By u2jrmw
I like many of the songs on this album, but the specifically the song Amsterdam impacted me and led me to write this...
Do you ever hear a song that makes you feel like it’s the soundtrack to your life? That every time you hear it you pause and wonder if you are really in some kind of Truman Show scenario, where everyone is watching this pivotal part of your story. That the music supervisor of your life has found just the right song to illustrate and amplify this particular moment of hope, tragedy, or desperation. Perhaps this is the end of the second act where you get beat down to your lowest point (don’t worry, act three is coming and that’s where redemption can so often be found), or maybe that indescribable swelling feeling of falling in love, or the wretched loneliness of heartbreak. Somehow the music transcends you being taken to the songwriters world and instead it becomes part of your reality, not just sound waves coming from a speaker, it is there delicate and exquisite, to be touched and held. Sometimes the words are the method by which you connect, but more often just the entirety of the sound is what drills deep into your brain, the tone of the voice means more than the words themselves, the swoop of the orchestra, the pounding of the beat, or the gentle pluck of the guitar strings. This is the opposite of an “ear-worm”, this is not a tune that gets stuck spinning around your head endlessly, this is a song that immediately removes you from the world around you, while simultaneously bringing everything into extreme-focus, you are watching your movie along with the audience, like an out-of-body experience. it is a song that feels like it is resonating at the same frequency as every atom in your body, to the point that you can’t quite understand how someone who doesn’t know you could have created it, for surely it was meant for you. I love that feeling, whether the song brings sadness or joy, it also brings a sense of humanity, a shared consciousness.
Regrettably this is transient, it is a perfect alignment of your brain chemistry and the patterns embedded in the music that have the mystical ability to create this experience, everything changes, and a year from now when you hear the song again, you may just think to yourself “hey that’s a good song”.
