you can't put music into words

putting into words effectively why you like particular kinds of music or performers is incredibly difficult - to try to sum up the emotional effect a particular song or a piece of music can have on you without sounding banal, trite and cliched is no mean feat - how can you effectively describe something that can move you to tears or make all the hairs on your body stand up or make you well up with a whole range of emotions so intense that it leaves you feeling uplifted and elated? .... well you can't, unless you've won a nobel prize for literature

i was reminded of this the other day when sitting alone on a comfy sofa having a coffee in one of our local cafes reading and listening to my favourite bob dylan album, 'blonde on blonde' on my ipod - 'just like a woman' came on and suddenly the sheer beauty of the track had me struggling with a desire to well up as i was sitting sipping my coffee - this was accompanied by the familiar feeling that this emotional response was something that i couldn't share with anyone else

i realised in my teens that it was a pointless exercise trying to turn friends on to music which i really liked and they had never heard before - most of my friends in the late seventies entered the world of popular music through punk and new wave and then moved on to heavy metal whilst i, having a leaning towards strong melodies and lush instrumentation, got into progressive rock - my collection of albums by the moody blues, the alan parsons project, emerson, lake & palmer, barclay james harvest, etc, puzzled many of my mid-eighties college friends - it was at that time i also realised how pointless it is arguing about whether or not certain kinds of music or artists are good and making value judgements about people informed by their musical tastes (which is why i haven't read the nme for many years)

i've been reassessing my music over the last few weeks, making playlists of my favourite artists because, let's face it, with a large library built up over 30-odd years, there are some things i'll probably never listen to again - i know people who have massive cd collections - an expat i knew in singapore regularly ventured into hmv with a large plastic basket and filled it up with cds - i always wondered how on earth he ever found time to listen to any of the music he bought more than once and that if he was always listening to new stuff, how he could ever come to know any of his collection really well

in my experience, it's the music i've been listening to for the longest time that means the most to me, the artists i have grown up with - while my musical tastes have developed, broadened and shot off down surprisingly unexpected avenues, i always end up coming back to my first loves - as a girl friend of mine in college once said about a very unfashionable band at the time, 'i put in on and it's like coming home'

this is why whenever i make those dreaded mental lists of all time favourite artists, songs and albums, most of the stuff contained therein comes from the sixties and seventies

alas, i shall never be a john peel