How might music define a story?

From time to time, I open Spotify and hit play. More often than not, the music comes from a TV or movie I have seen. But as time passes from when I first saw the story, the music stays. What I remember isn’t what happened to the characters or how the world changed. What I feel, rather than what I remember, is the only physical and mental sensation that I feel.

I often write to this music, letting the emotions that I created for myself with the music take me on journey. Perhaps the minor chord remind me of the vulnerability that I felt as a child standing on the playground? Or the way that the music swoops into a crescendo and the violins violently play, it reminds me of the imagined terror? Or simply as the lyrics wax fondly of a distant happiness, I remember the emotions of a memory so vividly that it felt like it happened just now.

When I first moved in, my neighbor downstairs would im me. “I hear that you’re playing Muse again,” he said, crushing heavily on the person that he thought I was.

Embarrassed and irritated, I would hit pause, and my speakers would be silent. “No more,” I said.

But then the following evening, I would forget and turn up my speakers again. He moved away later for graduate school. But I kept writing to the sounds of the music, finding the touch of the C notes, the shapely brass horns, and sultry singing voices to beckon me into imagination.

In the past 8 years, I have moved from movie scores to indie pop and back to movie scores. In hopes that they’ll tell me something that I don’t know.

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