Music Can Help Sort Out Life Songs Have The Power To Shape Your Thoughts And Memories

I’ve often felt that somewhere, out there on the cosmic radio band, there’s a running soundtrack for the movie of life. A lot of the time it feels like I’m mouthing the words to someone else’s script anyway, so there might as well be a soundtrack to go along with it.

When I really try, I can tune it in.

Music has power. It can change your mood; shape your opinions; open your mind. Or close it, for that matter. It can take you to all the places you’ve been before. It’s an instant Quantum Leap/Sliders/Dr. Who time machine. Only, you don’t have to squeeze into a call box.

“Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction puts me back on the best stroll of my life, down a street in Miami Beach with someone I was about to fall in love with. We had pizza. She whispered me secrets.

Today, I can’t listen to Aerosmith’s “Dream On” without remembering an elementary school incident. Back then I was in charge of spinning records over the P.A. system before school started. One day, I peeled away the cellophane and cued up the “Live Bootleg” album version. Imagine this horror: In the middle, singer Steven Tyler screams a certain unmentionable compound word beginning with M. And I’m responsible for introducing a whole school to it. I felt like crawling into my Army surplus backpack.

Sometimes, I bet, there are songs you wish weren’t playing in the background of your movie. The best single dance I ever had was at a junior prom, and I’ve been replaying every aspect of it in my mind’s VCR for years. How her white lace gloves felt against my cheeks. How her heels clicked on the tile. But the song? Kenny Rogers’ “We’ve Got Tonight.” Ugh.

Well-picked tunes often can say the things you need to say far better than you ever could yourself. A while ago, a friend made me a road tape to listen to while I drove to and through Tennessee, trying to get my head together. On the surface, it was a great tape. But underneath, her selections said far more about how she felt, and who she was, than she ever really told me herself. It’s like a 3D living portrait each time I listen to it.

I’m guilty of making tapes like that, too. Sometimes, it’s just a line that sums up how you’re feeling, like “Give me a Leonard Cohen afterworld, so I can sigh eternally.” Or “You gave me nothing, now it’s all I got.”

Music’s power also can be used for evil. Parental evil, that is. In my defiant teens (as opposed to my defiant 20s), my father and I played the power game one particularly vivid time. He got mad at me. I got mad back. He grounded me. I sat around and stewed. He took away my comic books. I sat around and cranked up the AC/DC. He took away the stereo.

I cracked in a matter of 30 minutes.

Music was like the social life I always wanted when I was young and painfully shy. There are as many different tunes to hear as there are people to meet. There’s music you can play in the background while you’re washing the dishes. There’s music that requires that you dance around in your underwear. And there’s music you can’t play in your Walkman at work because you can’t keep from singing along. That can be embarrassing. Plus, there’s nothing more annoying than someone who sings along to a Walkman.

Take it up a notch, and there’s a higher level of music. The kind that ensnares your mind like a pied piper, and you’re powerless to do anything but sit and listen, and float with the ebb and flow of the beat.

It’s not like this is any new information, or even much of a new perspective. People have known about the power of music since Aristotle. Hell, Aristotle could’ve been the first rock star if he’d put the philosophy to music.

There’s but one new way to really sum it up: Music is the best legal drug in existence. Imbibe freely.