Everybody's saying it, music is love - David Crosby

Several years ago, I read an essay by Zadie Smith in The New Yorker .  In it, she tries to explain her encounter with Joni Mitchell's music, which for her was apparently nearly a life-changing experience. Her piece inspired me to write, and I titled my piece Reflections on Reflections on Joni Mitchell: Blue and Green.  An excerpt is included below. I am currently having trouble doing something I want to do: write.  So I dug this out and offer it as a stimulus to me, and you, to be receptive, and expressive in whatever ways feel real. 

Music is a vehicle, and it is hard to describe what it is exactly, and how it works.  What is the mechanism of its magic?  It must be a resonance that occurs, a harmonic vibration between the performance and the listener. This is no doubt what Zadie Smith is talking about when she talks about attunement in her New Yorker essay, Some Notes on Attunement, a Voyage Around Joni Mitchell.  When the listener is receptive, the magic happens and you feel the music with, as my mother used to say, “every fiber of your being”. Sometimes the harmonic is so strong that it can break through barriers in the psyche, and you can see and feel things that were formerly locked away, or tangled up.  Maybe music is a lubricant that allows emotional knots to be untangled.  When such a musical experience is happening, it’s like you are riding a wave and there’s always gratitude.  

After reading Zadie’s piece, I downloaded Joni Mitchell's  1971 album Blue and listened.  Of course, in the 41 years since the album was released, I had heard these songs many times.  But it was time to revisit this music.  Little Green is the third song on the album. Like most of the songs, it deals with sadness and loss.  Her evocation of loss hit me suddenly, and as the song ended, I was weeping, convulsing. Just before this the elementary school shooting had occurred in Newtown, Connecticut.  Listening to Little Green had facilitated for me a connection to the “almost intolerable pain” of the parents, grandparents, the families who lost those young children in Sandy Hook. Joni had helped me move into that dark, dark place, not turn away.  I could momentarily face the pain of being human, the risks, the disasters, the full catastrophe, as Zorba the Greek called it.

At Kennedy Center in December 2012, Buddy Guy and the three surviving members of Led  Zeppelin were celebrated at the Annual Kennedy Center Honors.  A friend and fellow traveler on this musical journey had said the show was good, and it was no disappointment.  Writing this piece, I thought about the show and did some searching, wondering how others had expressed their reactions to it.  This idea of transformation and attunement came up.  Here’s Nate Cavalieri, writing in Spin magazine about the guitarist and singer  Gary Clark Jr., who performed at the event:

“Make no mistake: Gary Clark Jr.'s major-label debut (Blak and Blue) aims to introduce the Austin-based blues luminary to the widest possible audience. But which Gary Clark Jr. do you want to meet? The forceful stylist, sent to enrapture long-suffering blues fetishists? The cunning neo-soul charmer who's played sidekick to Alicia Keys? How about the "New Hendrix" that rock critics spent the past year stammering over? Or perhaps the heir apparent to garage-rock breakouts like the Black Keys or White Stripes? Depending on where exactly you sink into Blak and Blu, you might encounter any or all of the above; the collection places Clark among the most promising and unpredictable artists to break out of Austin's fertile scene in years.”

So the musician and the listener are both shape-shifters.  We move in the world and it affects us, changes us.  Joni sang the songs of Blue at a time of personal emotional vulnerability ; she describes it this way: “At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses, I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes”.  All her feeling was transmitted in her music, full force.  To certain listeners, attuned to the music in some special way by life experience or perhaps with some sort of genetic musical receptors hard wired in, something happens.  The music moves you, and your life changes.  You don’t become a different person, there’s nothing spectacular in the result, but you know something more about yourself  that you cherish, that allows you to carry on with more confidence.  We need connections, a feeling of relatedness.  Really, we need to feel embraced, not alone.  Especially at times of almost intolerable pain we need that almost intolerable beauty.  Somehow we need to feel the music, our music.  As Jackson Browne expressed it: “Don’t know what happens when people die.  Can’t seem to grasp it as hard as I try.  It’s like a song I can hear playing right in my ear that I can’t sing, I can’t help listening.”  Indeed.