Jesse Sample’s Freak of the Week airs EVERY WEDNESDAY at 5pm Eastern ONLY on RadioRadioX.com
This is Jesse Sample. What happens to you when you listen to music from your past? Why do you bother finishing the track? You know how it’s gonna go. You know, because you’ve heard this composition before, how the arrangement will develop. Why bother? You’ve heard this one before.
Now, If you’re anything like me, when you hear a track from your past, you experience a profound form of magic. This piece of music can transport you to the exact place that you were, when you first heard it.
When I hear a track from Stone Temple Pilot’s fourth album, I am in a Ford Escort driving across town through light November flurries to see my girlfriend. It’s been a quarter of a century, but that recording does something so direct to my brain, that I automatically take on the exact emotional complex, and I go there. Music can be a time machine to our nervous systems.
When we create music, we employ tools and sensibilities that we’ve been developing our whole lives. We try to go places that we don’t quite understand on a conscious level. We use frequencies to construct rooms, and in these rooms, we can move around and see how we feel. We mentally exist in an abstraction. This week, Rosa and I developed a few rooms, and we spent some time in them and allowed ourselves to be haunted by what was in them.
When we listen to the music that moves us, we are actively contributing to the actual body of work. Maybe Scott Weiland wrote the lyrics, but I was directing the movie of my life and forming the meanings. I subconsciously wrote about the bite of the late autumn air and reliable hum of the four-cylinder motor. I wrote about it so effectively, and in such detail, that even 25 years later and 800 miles away, when that song comes on the jukebox, I exist there and I feel it completely. We, as listeners, are all writers. And as writers, we are all listeners. This is one of the many powers of music.
Thanks to all of you tuned into RadioRadioX. This is the Freak of the Week, “Two Rooms and a Door.”
