Music, Emotions and Other Complex Things

If someone ever asks to explain what music is to me, I won't be able to. Not in coherent terms anyway. Because in all honestly, I don't understand much about it. Not the chords my favorite musician is hitting and not the notes of that particular part of the song I've been listening to for a week on repeat, the part that fills my chest with something indescribably warm and pleasant. And maybe that's okay, maybe it is not a necessity to understand every little thing about it to be able to love it but I wonder if it's normal to lean so heavily on music for comfort, to look for some sort of escape and tranquility and liberation in it all at the same time and yet not know anything about it except for the way it makes me feel.
Because after books I think it's the only thing that keeps me sane but how do I even begin to put that into words? I mean, books are still fairly easy to explain and discuss about. You can tell why you like a certain character or a story-line, the way the prose was written or the impeccable world-building - how it's a reflection of our own world or a dreaded future or perhaps the way it shows the author's attention to details because of how engaging it is. But how in the world do I explain why the part of "Death Dreams" by Frightened Rabbits where his voice rises slightly while singing the lines -"White noise. I don't know if there's breathing or not." makes me so incredibly sad? How do I explain that there is something about the music they play just after he sings "A painting of a panic attack", about the bells ringing amidst the intensely gloomy music, that makes me plunge into this sad daze? It's truly a constant struggle because you want more people to know about your favorite songs, most of which are underrated and hardly known, but your inability to put their uniqueness into words stops you. Still, despite my inability, I realized I really do want to talk about them even if it's just gibberish and incoherent thoughts piled together. I want to talk about songs that I listen to when I am so happy nothing can possibly bring me down, songs that I turn to when I need some uplifting on rough days, songs that I have associated with my favorite books and fictional characters(those are the ones that I like to pretend are made just for them because how can they not be when they capture the feel of those books/characters so well?), songs with extraordinary music which compel me to forget everything and wonder what the artists were thinking when they composed them; the ones with too much emotions and missing stories so you fill them with your own, and songs that you never admit to knowing every word of- guilty pleasures that you tap your foot to in public with a bored expression on your face while inside you are screaming along with the singer.
What I am trying to say here is, I believe it's a disservice to the things we genuinely love if we don't talk about them and I used to be the kind of person who talked about what appeals to her and what doesn't freely, without a care in the world, even if it were something silly or weird but somewhere along the way I stopped altogether. So much that now I find myself struggling when I talk about something as close to me as books and stories, and I guess I want to bring back that part of me back because I miss obsessively rambling about things to the point of sheer exhaustion. I miss being attached to things and being able to express the connection in words however I can.

Last week while searching for reading inspiration in video edits, I came upon Where's My Love by SYML and that song did something to me. There is this deeply mournful quality to it and as you listen, you find yourself grieving along with the singer even though you have no idea whose loss you are mourning or the singer is, for that matter. The myriad of emotions this song makes me feel are hard to describe. He sings:

Did she run away?
Did she run away? I don’t know
If she ran away
If she ran away, come back home
Just come home

- and you imagine his loved one running away and him pleading her to come back. The last line-"Just come home"-is sung in an almost whisper that feels like part prayer and part plea. The second chorus is addressed to the person herself and it's full of urgency and desperation and longing and love.

Did you run away?
Did you run away? I don’t need to know
If you ran away
If you ran away, come back home
Just come home

The thing about this song is, if you listen to it as many times as I did, you start out imagining the woman he lost and later the image sort of blurs and transforms into someone you knew. "She" is someone you lost recently, "She" is your past happy self who only exist in glimpses of memory, "She" is a friend who went away and you are asking all of them to come home in a way, the meaning varied in each case. But whatever or whoever you imagine, you are bound to end up with a huge lump in your throat, all your feelings gathering there and refusing to let go. I listen to songs like this and I can't help but marvel at how powerful music is, how it makes you feel so much, how it makes everything a lot more bearable, and if this isn't what magic is supposed to feel like, I don't know what is. Kind of reminds me of something I read in Saving June by Hannah Harrington:

“Eric Clapton had a four-year-old son who fell forty-nine stories through an open window of their apartment and died,” he says.
I stare at him in return, waiting to see how this could possibly be relevant to his point.
“Clapton wrote this song about it, after, and it just—It rips your heart out,” he continues. “It is the best kind of devastating there is. He took his pain and he turned it into something beautiful. Into something that people connect to. And that’s what good music does. It speaks to you. It changes you.” Jake leans in toward me a little closer, voice softening. “What I’m trying to say is, it’s just nice, I guess, knowing that someone else can put into words what I feel. That there are people who have been through things worse than I have, and they came out on the other side okay. Not only that, but they made some kind of twisted, fucked-up sense of the completely senseless. They made it mean something. These songs tell me I’m not alone. If you look at it that way, music…music can see you through anything.”

 It does, Jake. It really does.