Listener, Seeker, Lionheart, Passionate Philosopher

Listening: Somebody's Arms - Sarah Slean

Old record playing on my own radio
And I know it's time to go
Get up and out of this black hole
Gotta get it right
Gotta quit these drugs
Gotta get inside somebody's arms tonight, tonight
Can't remember who I was before tonight, tonight
Oh, my heart is halfway out the door tonight.

Sweet city come on give me a handful of stars
I'm ready for the midnight show
Gonna light a fire on the street I love
Gonna get inside somebody's arms tonight, tonight
Can't remember who I was before tonight, tonight
Oh, my heart is halfway out the door tonight.

I know I told Benji I was going to bed (it is 3 AM, and I am truly exhausted) but some little part of me was niggling. Perhaps this is the same little part of me that, when it hears certain things, begins to quiver a bit. Specifically, when it hears music.

I know I've probably established by now that I'm something of a music fanatic, but I just feel the desire to point out a little more emphatically just what a deep niche music has carved in my life. I cannot go a single day without listening to at least some music. Sometimes I don't care what I hear, so long as it's music, but there are days when I need the cadence of instrumental pieces or the melody of purring vocals. There are days when I need to hear Imogen Heap over Tori Amos, or Sarah Slean over Vienna Teng, or Mogwai over God is an Astronaut. There are days when certain albums or certain songs will mean more to me than they have before.

My grandfather's favorite question is how much music my iPod can hold. When I give him the answer (30G) and report that I currently have over 2000 songs on it, he gets this rather irritated look on his face and asks, "Who on earth needs that much music?"

The answer is me. No matter how much music I have on my iPod, the fact is that that number will continue to grow. Music is something that fascinates me in a way that I can't express with words. Often, when I set my iPod to shuffle and let it scout through my library, I'm surprised to find a song I haven't heard in months, or a song that I've never paid much attention to. Faint subtleties in music make it all the more fascinating. An artist myself, I am dazzled by the way the beauty that musicians can weave with their medium (sound) is comparable to the beauty artists weave using theirs (sight). Take, for example, Not the Red Baron by Tori Amos. While I acknowledged that I liked it, I never really paid serious attention to the song until one night when it just hit me how beautiful it was. It now ranks among my top favorite songs.

Some songs just strike a chord in you. I opened four of my Christmas presents tonight, all CDs, which is what prompted me to write this post. The first was Sarah Slean's latest album, Orphan Music. Hearing the live tracks is like being back in that crowded, dimly-lit theatre, watching the petite slip of a woman in a red dress draw the audience to an awed hush with merely a grand piano and her own brand of art. The second track, Somebody's Arms, struck me as familiar, and I realized that she'd played it at her concert, and I'd forgotten it in the excitement. Hearing it again makes my heart pound, no matter how often I listen to it.

Mogwai's Mr. Beast had much the same effect. By the end of Auto Rock, I just felt like curling up into a little ball of contentment and purring. The third album was Awake by Josh Groban. I developed a sort of unhealthy lust for him after my mother bought his first album back when I was in junior high, though I'd fallen a bit on the wayside in the interim between his last album, Oceano. Awake quickly mended the gap with its first song, Mai. I've never heard a voice quite like this man's, and I doubt I ever will. By the time the second track, You Are Loved (Don't Give Up), finished playing, I was in my happy place.

It was around this time that I realized that a song I'd been looking for for months had finally finished downloading from its queue on Soulseek--Please Wake Up, as sung by Michael Crawford. It may be from a kid's movie, Once Upon A Forest (which, yes, I did watch as a child) but it remains one of the only songs in existence that can give me goosebumps every time I hear it.

I realized tonight that while I am primarily drawn to contemporary instrumentalists and female singer/pianists, I'm also drawn to people who seem to be only half in this world. I know immediately when they are, usually just from hearing their music or hearing them talk, mainly because I'm usually half in my own world myself. The instant Sarah Slean came onstage, I knew I was going to like her. She, like many other people I'm a fan of, has this air about her that is so obvious that you wouldn't be surprised to hear that she'd just stalked out from the other side of the Fey or something. Tori Amos' lyrics suggest the same of her, not to mention her album art (as well as a thoroughly fascinating and befuddling map from her album From the Choirgirl Hotel. It doesn't just happen with musicians--I'm the same way with writers, like the fabulous Neil Gaiman and Charles de Lint.

I always wish I knew these half-in-half-out people personally, just because I know that if I could call them one night from a dark subway station in a city I didn't know, and they wouldn't hang up on me, I know the conversations we would have would be something to remember.

Icarus really needs to stop posting when she's not really herself.