For granted, for habit, for passion.

You fill up my senses
Like a night in a forest
Like the mountains in springtime
Like a walk in the rain
Like a storm in the desert
Like a sleepy blue ocean
You fill up my senses
Come fill me again

-John Denver

Roughly 2 and 1/2 miles from my childhood home, a small country church housed in a nondescript metal building with blue doors would faithfully fill with a handful of families every Sunday morning. The pastor and his family lived in the same building, the living spaces partitioned from the sanctuary by carpeted dividers with hollow metal feet that met the ceiling halfway. My dad would always bring his acoustic guitar and accompany a woman who played an upright piano that flanked the side of the makeshift stage. During the musical portion of the service (always at the beginning), an overhead projector topped with yellowing paper and clear laminate would flood the canvas behind the stage (which might have just been a bedsheet). My dad and the piano lady would lead the small congregation in four or so songs. Some weeks only our family would show up. When this occurred we would chat with the pastor for a few minutes and leave to attend to the other Sunday traditions ahead-of-schedule.

After the service, I would play for ten to fifteen minutes outside with one of the pastor's kids. The front of the church past the gravel lot was flanked by several dozen small trees, their only purpose seemingly being to become a makeshift playground once a week. After we exchanged our "see you next Sunday"s and were collected and ushered into minivans, we would as religiously head to the grandparents' house for Sunday dinner (read 'lunch'). After eating and doing a load of dishes my uncle would roll his sleeves up and play some of his churches' selections that week on the upright piano in the un-air conditioned back room (next to the chest freezer, the sewing machine, and the dog food). I would occasionally bring my dad's guitar in to pass the afternoon.

From roughly birth to early elementary school I experienced this same routine every Sunday. The praise and worship part of these services were some of my first memories of my musical life. I'm told by my parents that I would routinely stand up on the pews as a toddler, enthusiastically providing additional nonsense and alternate verses.

There were other musical pillars in those early years. As for many, I was deeply affected by the sacredness of Christmas. That childhood church would get decorated every year by the pastor's volunteered family (garland on the partitions, wreath behind the stage, greenery lining the walls and upright piano). The church we left for was bigger and brought more musical exposure, with Christmas parties held at my house that half the church would attend. Family get-togethers for the holidays (Thanksgiving often included a singing of a hymn before we ate), reunions, weddings, funerals, really any other excuse to congregate- music was always at the center of these traditions.

Even the non-musical memories from my childhood were implicitly musical- the inevitable Mannheim Steamroller carol accompanying the yearly viewing of Home Alone 1 & 2 on a grandparent-recorded VHS (commercials sometimes cut out even) comes to mind, or spending an evening each summer in the outdoor amphitheater down the road from that country church hearing Rodgers' melodies & Hammerstein's lyrics in that year's go of Oklahoma! as a choir of crickets threatened to overpower the cast. And it was standard weeknight routine to watch oldies on the TV around dinnertime, the nuances of front porch hymns and bandstand sambas not lost on me.

I was lucky that I was a child to parents who both regularly played music. They wrote songs together- about the passage of time, Heaven, loved ones that had passed. They also grew up singing a lot of  the above mentioned John Denver (my dad's favorite), other old songs like 'Wayfaring Stranger' and 'Will The Circle Be Unbroken', or songs that I now long for at Christmas like Jim Reeves' 'Scarlet Ribbons', or a tender 'Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella'. During the handful of funerals I attended throughout my early life, my parents often sang the old spiritual 'Beulah Land' (Beulah Land, I'm longing for you, and some day, on Thee I'll stand, There my home, Shall be eternal Beulah Land, sweet Beulah Land), and once, Danny Boy, when my uncle of the same name passed away too soon. Earlier in my life my dad would sing me to sleep with one of the many verses of Marty Robbins' sprawling El Paso. 

I didn't ever know it then- those experiences were slowly constructing the framework of meaning for my life. As my musical world opened up and I grew older, what was subconscious rose more and more to the surface. What was once a circumstance (the band needs a guitarist/the parents stick around to play songs another hour/the car ride home is boring without lugging along my walkman and CD collection) showed itself to all be consequential in the development of my musical person I now identify with so strongly. What was such a chore at times became, unequivocally, a pleasure and passion.

In my past and throughout my present there have been countless moments in which music has profoundly moved me, changing me permanently even. The meaning, even as just a listener, that music has brought me is starting to feel shortchanged if I relegate it to only passing thoughts.

I stumbled upon the French term Frisson- a sense of being physically affected (chills or goosebumps) by a non-physical situation, piece of art, or other meaningful stimuli- a few years ago and felt it was a decent way to describe a documenting of, and ode to, what is musically meaningful to me.

Those moments of frisson, when they occur, magnify a deeper need to express and reflect on the kinds of moments, ideas, people, and memories that affect me. I suspect that this is universal need. Be it a poem, film, memory, kind of food, song, TV show- these things all become conduits that relay to the bigger meaning we collectively harvest from our time together. 

So begins a look into that meaning, once a week.  I'd love to hear your thoughts and the music that has brought meaning to you.