When Music Remembers What We Can’t Explain
Awareness Through Culture - Music
Johnny Guitar Watson – Strung Out
A few weeks ago I went to one of my neighboring cities to gather some new scenery and see some new sites. Unfortunately, the night ended badly in that I didn’t find anything entertaining for myself, so I decided to call it an early night. Fairly disappointed, I got in the car and cut on my radio. And then a song came on that was just two years younger than I am, but I had never heard it. I have heard other songs by this artist, but this song somehow had evaded me. The artist is Johnny “Guitar” Watson and the song is called Strung Out. It instantly became a favorite.
Let me start by saying there is something incredibly special about this song. The opening hits me in a way that I’ve never been able to fully explain. Before the song even really gets going, I found myself restarting the song’s beginning because I found myself experiencing emotions that came from different places all at once. It’s an incredibly beautiful feeling, but even in that, there was a bittersweet taste to it, too. What’s interesting is, I don’t even have the words to explain exactly what I felt hearing the opening or why.
Since really speaking about Kind Rebirths, I have started recognizing that music has a way to connect me personally to love and to relationships. It conjures up important women I’ve known, loving relationships that I’ve experienced, and people for whom I still carry strong romantic feelings for. But it doesn’t stop here. Some music can connect me to women I’ve never met personally, some admired from a distance, leaving me with romantic possibilities that exist more so in my imagination than in my personal history. So how does music, let alone one song, do that?
Music is known to bring back old memories and I think there is much more that goes unsaid. While a familiar melody can remind us of a particular person, or a place, or interesting period within our lives, music also awakens strong feelings deep inside of us that aren’t always tied to one specific memory. Sometimes it just reminds us of what if feels like to love someone wholeheartedly, to severely miss someone , or to just imagine a connection that never truly had a chance to develop. That recognition is at the heart of a Kind Rebirth Moment.
When I was listening, I realized that I didn’t have to try and identify every emotion or even need to connect it to one particular person in order for the experience to be one of meaning. The happiness, the longing, the affection, and sadness all existed together. Amazingly, I wasn’t even required to decide which feeling was correct or which feeling explained things in a way that made everything clear. I was able to just sit back and let the music help me find awareness of whatever feelings were being brought forward. That alone is something worth considering.
We spend a lot of time trying to understand our emotions and then sometimes we completely overlook the experience of the actual feeling they bring. We want too many explanations. We want reasons. We want to categorize them as good feelings or bad. But in truth, maybe they’re just there to stoke the fire of mindful awareness of feeling to reflect on. Emotions don’t always need definition; they just need to be noticed, observed, and witnessed (NOW) – to reflect on what’s going on within us.
To this day, I still cannot fully explain how that opening makes me feel something I don’t carry around with me all the time. Of course, I have attached the song here in the blog and I hope you enjoy it as much as I have. The way that opening guitar hits is something memorable and memory-making for me. I don’t know if it’s a call to love or a reflection of past love, but I can feel the melody move me. Again, I can’t quite call what it is, but I’m okay with that. Because what matters is that moment Johnny comes in and then all the possibilities it brings forward. I like feeling something of meaning without knowing what it is. I guess I like the curiosity of life like that. I hope you find meaning in it too.
Remember this, music can be more than just a reminder of the people we’ve loved along the way. It gives us a little more. It makes us aware that we possess the capacity to love more than we even know and that it can arrive when we least expect it. I hope hearing Johnny Watson’s Strung Out combined with mindfulness creates more possibilities than you can imagine.
Johnny "Guitar" Watson - Strung Out
Stay mindful…
Rebirth
