Music Thoughts

Let me see where I want to begin this thought for the day. I have several different approaches but not a one of them seems to stick out more than others. I guess the better option is to go with where the thought originated. So maybe, I should start with a build up.

It all begins with where I am working. See, I may have mentioned it in the past but I am going to say it again now. I have been driving a school bus for a bit now. The hours seem to work with writing times and it has proven to be something I can walk away from when I clock out for the day. I can dig it.

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Oddly, I tend to keep music off when I have students on the bus. It is less distracting and for the kids I drive I need to monitor conversations quite a bit. I am driving an alternative education run (basically the trouble makes, much like I was when I was there age). I try to catch potential problems before they blow up into something much worse.

Anyway, I usually turn on the radio after I am by myself on the bus. We have decent speakers and I can play it loud for myself. It just happened the other day that I a genesis song kicked on when I turned the radio on. I was sitting there at a traffic light listening to it and of course, singing along with it. It fit that moment in time perfectly. A bunch of stuff I was thinking about, the general mood of the day, pretty much life in that particular moment. It sent me in a reflective mood ever since.

I have quite a bit of music that I have collected over the years, somewhere over 100 gigabytes worth. It covers quite a few different genres. What I am saying here is, music flows through my veins or something like that. I recently had decided to push all my music into Apple Music match. I played with their service for a bit and enjoyed being able to get new stuff on demand, but don’t like the monthly fee or skipping over stuff I already own. Music match is a much smaller yearly fee and holds the collection for easy download. I also have amazon prime so I can check out new music as part of that. Anyway, where was I going with this?

Yeah…

So reflective mood and music. I began thinking of how our understanding of music changes and morphs over time. I have collected all this music over a number of years. Generally when I add it to the collection I do it because the artist has gotten a connection to me in some way. I like the songs and they fit the mood then. I don’t always think of how the music I have liked in the past will fit in with who I become as I age.

I find it fascinating how we interpret our lives through the music that touches us and how we come to new understandings of what we hear as our perception of the world changes.

I rarely run across something in the collection that doesn’t resonate with me now. It tends to be more along the lines of me digging through, looking for something to listen to, and finding something I had forgotten how much I enjoyed it in the past. It’s a treasure hunt to find something that you connected with long ago and now it resonates in new ways to become a cherished sound all over again.

I don’t know, maybe you’ve felt it, maybe you haven’t. This is where I am. The musical journey continues as I dig through my past and into my future with sounds that sometimes hit in unexpected ways.

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