last night i went to the cocorosie show.  it was unbelievable.  how they manage to meld genres from opera to beat boxing together into one glorious sound, i will never know.  but it blew my heart and mind off.

in the past week i’ve been to at least two shows that have made me question my entire livelihood.  i don’t know what it is about music, about how it can literally transport my entire being into another world and leave me completely and utterly happy, but i love it.  i have come to realize that there is this magical thing which exists in the world that i long to be a part of, that i long to create alongside those already creating it.  i can’t explain it.  i can’t tell you why when certain words are strung out across notes and over chords, put to a beautiful melody, pieced together by one beat and another beat, and sung instead of spoken a part of my heart that i didn’t even know existed gets completely slayed.  and i can’t tell you why we as humans, as creative or non-creative as we are, all identify with something in music that hits us much deeper than words alone ever could.

i can’t explain it.  but i don’t care.

and i think, more than a dozen times at least, while being totally wrapped up in each of these shows, myself and the beautiful friends accompanying me thought to ourselves, “i want this to be my life.”  and i do.  i want to do this thing; this thing that makes people so completely united with beauty, with life, with truth, with themselves, and with everything else we don’t quite know how to get at all by ourselves.  and there’s a huge part of that desire that terrifies the life out of me.  it seems near impossible, given the fact that i’m not anything close to a good musician, but that’s almost what makes it even more beautiful.  i think maybe i could be, if i really wanted to.

and until i can make this a reality, i am going to continue letting my heart get flayed open by people like cocoon (tomorrow) and bon iver (this weekend) and this girl, who opened for cocorosie-

katie stelmanis

music.  there’s just something about it.  and i don’t have the answer.  but i don’t care.  i just want to be around the people creating it, and eventually create it with them.  and if i can’t, then i will create this same heart shattering, life blowing, i could die happy, everything is beautiful truth some other way.

that is all.

“how is it that you have a chord here and then another chord there, and then your heart breaks open? i don’t know the answer. maybe it’s that music is about as physical as it gets. your essential rhythm is your heartbeat. your essential sound the breath. we’re walking temples of noise and when you add the human heart to this mix, it somehow lets us meet on a bridge that we couldn’t get to any other way.” (Ann Lamott on This American Life #104: Music Lessons)