Music is one of the only things that, if you really think about it, is so intensely complex, it'll hurt your head to comprehend it. (Architecture is probably the only other thing that I feel this way about, and maybe even more so, because I at least understand music to a degree. Architecture just amazes me.)
Music is just so multi-faceted, so many things on so many levels, and there is absolutely no one in the world who can possibly understand it all. No one. I am convinced of that. Lyrics, notes, percussion, chords, 3 or 4 or 10 or 20 or 60 or 100 piece bands. Think about that, the complexity of 100 people on so many different instruments, playing different lines, on different cues, sometimes in different time signatures. And one writer writing it. Think of a orchestral piece, strings, brass, woodwinds and percussion, instruments in different keys and pitches, and one mind puts them all together into something so incredible. Talk about a beautiful mind.
I just got goosebumps thinking about it.
I was listening to John Coltrane today, and Coltrane is one of those musicians I cannot ever, ever, ever listen to on shuffle, and here's why: Coltrane is an artist whose progression of talent you can hear, starting from his earliest recordings, moving on to his latest. You can quite literally hear him getting better. When I was younger and all my friends (every last one of them) was in the jazz program at the college we went to, we had an indepth discussion about this. The transformation of early Coltrane to late Coltrane is masterful, and apparently there are spades of unreleased material that we may or may not ever get to hear.
And sure, every artist progresses, but it doesn't seem to happen the same way anymore. Everything is so polished, and the artists worth listening to (there are so, so many who aren't) have, to a degree, started to master their craft before they even cut their first record. And a lot of those won't release more than two albums.
So it makes you wonder what it's like to be in someone else's mind, someone else who obviously has a better handle on it than you do. I don't mean, like, Bach or Beethoven. I mean someone like John Mayer (typical of me, I know). But when you hear a John Mayer song, you know you're hearing a John Mayer song. Not because he's got a formula or there's anything predictable about it, but because he's got a feel. Layering, and yes, a distinctive guitar tone. I can't even comprehend what it's like to be in his head when he's writing. I know what happens in my own, but I am not the musician or writer he is.
Or someone like Alicia Keys, who is such a brilliant artist. In my opinion (one that a lot of people might scoff at), she resurrected R&B in the early 2000's; bridged the gap between more adult contemporary artists and the 'whisper singers' like Ashanti who did absolutely nothing for the genre. Alicia writes her own songs, and does it brilliantly. I've seen clips of her in the studio, and when she's in the zone, it's almost like you're afraid to look at her, like you're witnessing something too personal, but you can't help it. She's intense and focused, like whatever idea is in her head is going to torture her until she gets it perfectly on paper and on record.
I realize I don't really know that feeling. Sure, I am a bit of a perfectionist, and I'm creative, and I'll wake up at three in the morning and write for hours, because if I don't write this, right now, it's going to disappear. It'll be gone forever and I'll never get it back, and what if that was the perfect thing and I let it slip away?
I wonder if that's a neurosis every artist has.
But if it is, I'm almost certain that it's that very neurosis that fuels the progression.
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alicia keys,
john coltrane,
john mayer,
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