It's the around 0815, on the last Monday of 2009.
Snow has already come and gone in London - winter fulfilled it's promises early, and now the sky is empty and blue. I'm listening to Placebo, finally making my pilgrimage through their albums, fifteen years after the rest of the world discovered the talents of Brian Molko and Stefan Olsdal.
Every band has a point of discovery for the listener - a time and a place where the music fits into our lives like psychic mirror. Lyrics that never before registered on our radar are suddenly written in ten foot tall letters. Turbulent feelings somehow resonate with those of a complete stranger, and time falls away into the darkness, lost in the light of melodies, chords and rhythms.
Music has this immutable quality. It is water for the soul. It is a connecting force without equal. To live in a world without it would be unimaginable.
From the moment we are born we begin to make the music of our own lives. Tiny lungs fill with air, our first breath is taken, and we announce ourselves as the newest member of humanity. Eyes may be closed at will, but the hearing sense is not made this way. For better or for worse, we will be listening to each other and the world around us for the rest of lives.
I love analogies for human relationships. The image of a 'garden' has always been a favourite of mine - the process of growing or restricting, nuturing or neglecting. Water has been another analogy I favour - the idea of a 'source', of feeling full or empty, or the ebb & flow of tides that reflect the patterns in our lives.
And now a new analogy - voices and songs.
This one I really love, because it contains an element lacking from the other two, and that element is 'time'.
Not 'big' time - the kind measured in decades, years, months, weeks, or even days. But 'little' time. This is the kind of time we can use to measure heartbeats in. The kind of time that falls between sentences, and quickly pours into awkward silences.
It is the grains of sands in an hourglass - at a glance it is liquid, slow and smooth. But if you look closely, it is chaos and movement - a universe of collisions and inevitability that rules our lives without so much as a whisper. Our relationship with 'little' time is what creates our day-to-day reality. We move between periods of feeling like time is running too slowly, or too quickly. If we are 'lucky' or particularly aware or skillfull we can live part of our lives 'in sync'. This is the feeling of being 'in the flow', that all is working as it should be.
This is the secret of music - a feeling of synchronicity with the world, and others around us.
Every day we breathe, every moment we live through, we are creating a personal rhythm. Our voices combine with those of others to create a form of music - a song, if you will. The song may be harmonious, or dissonant, depending on the person we are with, and the way we are feeling at the time. And as with music, even the silences form part of the song.
Music and the human heart both possess the same inexpressable qualities which make them so special. They fall into the land between the lines on a page, between the words in a sentence. They fall into the vast unknown between reason and passion.
With most people, we can fumble through the rudimentary tunes - meeting and greeting. Perform basic exchanges such as talking about the weather. With some people however, we are harmonised from the moment we meet, and the conversation know no end. With others, mysteriously, it is like two out-of-tune instruments that may never find a common starting point.
Even if we can't identify exactly what the problem is, we all know when something doesn't feel right. And its at this point, that things get interesting.
