Meta Memoreis
Ever since I was a kid and had any kind of intellectual thought at all, I've spent days, months, hours, maybe years, thinking about what it must be like to be another person.
And this isn't (always) from wanting to be another person. It's really just wondering if the experience is the same or different from what I've been experiencing.
It's a cousin of, but not really related to, "What must that person be thinking?" Because what I've come to know is that not only can you not, with any accuracy, come up with what the person next to you is thinking, they don't know what they're thinking either, or have a clear idea of what that is. So as you go through your days trying to figure out what that person must think, it's kind of a spritz to the face moment: stop thinking about it now.
The point is that if you're trying to tell someone what you think and how you feel, that's also a bit of an impossibility, trying to get the point across and barge through their prejudices and all that stuff.
HOWEVER, what you can do with music is very accurately get your feeling across. You've got a feeling that you're transmitting out there. Listeners are picking up on it, and then they're putting their feelings into it. And they send that back out there, to you and the the greater whatever.
If the connection is made on a subconscious level, that's when it takes root as there is a real familiarity there. It becomes this kind-of meta-memory.
Later, they won't remember your face, your shape, the time, or anything associated with it. But when they hear that song, they associate that memory with their own memory, and the whole feeling is back.
I practiced and I can really put myself back in the place of something I heard in the mid 80s for the first time. I close my eyes and go back there. It's a non-materialistic time, travel technique that 100% works.
Bob Dylan recently said that when you get older, you realize that the world stands still and you're the one who's moving. This must be a part of that and this is what constant music making does to you. It keeps you connected to all of this. So never mind the popularity, or my case the unpopularity. It is all about staying connected to whatever all this stuff is.
I grew up in the Catholic Church, and the one thing they're really great at is hanging onto the mystery of it all.
With music you've got to hang onto the mystery, and step back to just wonder at it regularly.