The who (and not me) of listening

One of the things I miss most about my past is the luxury of experiencing effortless, daily friendships with guys that I grew up with and knew most of my life. It's been a fleeting thing for me in adulthood- everyone gets paired off with a significant other and daily becomes monthly, yearly in some cases. In high school it was all the time, only to be interrupted by class and exclusive family affairs. It was at this same time that I first felt that way, as close as a friend, for music.

This relatively obscure Christian rock band called mewithoutYou gave me musical frisson for the first time. I had discovered them by chance on a sampler CD. Their music was dramatic and intriguing, like nothing I'd heard before. The sinker was seeing them at a festival I went to one summer with friends (deep in our 'daily' season). I believe I attended the concert alone, standing under an oversized tent in a sweat-scented Illinois field. The lead singer, a somewhat neurotic twenty-something, was known for alternating displays of extreme meekness and impassioned drama. He'd decorated the stage with discarded flowers from some dumpster, taped to the mic stands and laying on the drum risers. Slinking in the shadows near the back of the stage or next to the drums during instrumental sections of songs, he'd blitz the mic at the last second, never appearing to allot enough time but always succeeding. Flowers would occasionally go flying in fits of fervor as he declaimed personal, prose-style lyrics, every fan in the packed tent singing in tandem. 

The band (who fulfilled my deep quintessentially teenage need for experimental rock, drama, angst, and lyrical poetry) made the first music that I deeply related to on a emotional and spiritual level. Commissioned, gorgeously textured paintings by Russian painter Vasily Kafanov dress each of their six albums. Overarching themes of faith, romantic entanglement, living in community, family, suffering, doubt, existentialism, the human condition, depression, and personal identity run through their music. Singer Aaron Weiss would draw from an unbelievably wide swath of lyrical inspiration, with concepts and imagery being borrowed from the Bible (heavily from both the Old and New Testament), Quran, poets like Blake and Keats, writers like Nietzsche and Tolstoy, philosophers like Descartes and Kierkegaard, Sufi poets like Rumi...in a dazzling collection of thought from across the ages. 

Their lyrics lit my mind up, from detailing epic allegories of personified beetles seeking to discover the (to them) great mystery of a simple brush fire. Or an entire album dedicated to the fictional crashing of a circus train in late 19th century rural Montana, all the anthropomorphized animals escaping and grappling with their newfound freedom. Other more personal lyrics detail intense depression, trying to have faith in the modern world, and losing oneself in greater meaning. It shouldn't work, but how it did for me.

I must have listened to their first album in its entirety once through, daily, for months (often on that old bus, knees propped up on the vinyl seat back with the Walkman clutched to my side). Previous music in my life had this glass ceiling of meaning built into it (just that "I really love listening to this", "it's super catchy", or "this puts me in a good mood"). This band shattered that ceiling, giving me seemingly endless additional nuance with each listening. I remember once, teenage me being chauffeured home by my mom (this moment occurring on the road directly in front of that old church from the first post, as it happened). I was ritualistically listening to mwY's second album through my headphones. During one of my favorite instrumental sections, John Denver's 'Mathew' (my mom was playing it on the car stereo) started to bleed through my headphones, in the same key*. It didn't particularly mean anything extraordinary, except for being one of the many pleasures of art (and contrasting things being juxtaposed wonderfully together) that occurs by accident in my musical world, forever held in my memory. Not to confuse correlation with causation- I was definitely at the ideal age to feel such amplified feelings. Now that I've grown up a little though, I know that it did mean as much as I initially thought. They remain one of my favorite bands today. 

If there's anything true I've learned about music (and all art), it's that the meaning it does or doesn't convey to an individual is deeply personal and widely subjective. Most of my friends weren't into mewithoutYou- it's music that one immediately lights up to or finds annoying and obtuse. Likewise- people I deeply respect and relate to have had musical tastes that I found uninspired or bland, etc. I believe the deeper connection to be made here is that there are memories, experiences, and works of art that are held close by anybody. Expressing these to one another, simply recognizing that people are people with things in their lives that carry great unique meaning, seems to be one of the 'good deeds in a weary world' that should shine more from all of us than it does. One summer tour that band invited fans to play a bit with them on unique instruments. I brought a mandolin and met them several hours before with a fair amount of other people. The singer hung out with all of us as we played some music and told stories together, his meaning being passed on to total strangers, and ours to him. That's the magical thing that art can regularly do if we let it, be it a song about everything or something small and simple.

I saved one of the flowers I found on the ground after that first show in a gallon-sized ziplock bag because I knew that the what I had witnessed that night was something that would remain meaningful to me forever.

"I do not exist," we faithfully insist
While watching sink the heavy ship of everything we knew
If ever you come near I'll hold up high a mirror
Lord, I could never show you anything as beautiful as You

'Messes of Men'- mewithoutYou

*These two links, clicked on immediately and consecutively (allowing them both to play together), replicate what I heard in that car ride home. Link 1 (mwy), Link 2 (JD).

*Some live footage of that show I first saw. It's pretty hard rock (forewarning to those of us that have mellowed out, me included).