04/29/2023: The Magic of Music

My chatter is on the magical properties of music. To me, musicians are the closest we have to actual Wizards. They can conjure a feeling and then make another human soul have that feeling or launch another feeling. Writing does this too, of course, but it’s rare when a line of a book can stop you on a street the way a song that comes on shuffle can.

The magic is not in what the music tells you so much as the place it creates for you to feel something deeply. What it comes to mean to you might even shock the author of the actual song. I recited John Prine’s,  Mexican Home, at a tribute to him when he was alive and John was in the audience and he was polite enough not to say to me afterwards “All that stuff you found in that song, I didn’t know I put it there!”

I listened to a version of that song about 100 times before that event. He sang it on a live album with a musician named Josh Ritter and it’s a beautiful duet. And that introduced me to Josh’s music. Josh has a song that he wrote that has one of those lines that I’ve been talking about. It’s a song called “Only a River.” Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead sang it on his album Blue Mountain.

The line is “Only a River going to make things right.” And I know exactly what that means, though I couldn’t tell you what Josh Ritter thinks it means or what it should mean for you. That song is in my regular rotation.

What has always interested me about this magic of song is that the connection between songwriter and listener says at a basic level: you are not alone. This thing you’re feeling, I feel it too, though as I say, you may be feeling different things than the author of the song felt. But at bottom you feel less lonesome.

On the other hand, the process of creating a song is often so lonesome. You can write a song alone, in a dorm room or in the stairwell of your dorm, and you are all alone. And then who knows if anybody likes the song and that accentuates the lonesomeness of putting these lyrics that feel true to you out in the world.

But!

Then a song goes out into the world and it travels on its own life and it makes those connections with listeners. It works that magic and 25 years later on the other side of the world from the dorm in which you wrote that song the people of Nagoya, Japan can have that song sung to them by Bob Dylan. Which is exactly what happened to Josh Ritter’s song Only A River. Dylan had never sung it before and it was a beautiful version because Dylan has finally stopped shouting which makes his shows lovely.

Someone posted to Josh Ritter on Twitter that Dylan had sung his song and Ritter told this story of writing it alone in his dorm 25 years earlier and then he said this:

“To all my friends out there making art: it’s not always this easy seeing the ripples your work makes, but take the story of my little song, Only a River, as comfort. Art travels. Voices carry. Your art is out there in the world, making its home in many places, many hearts.”

I was moved by this because I believe it so deeply. I posted Josh’s song “Only A River” on Twitter. I don’t know him, but I wanted the world to know about the song and he replied. He’s been a gabfest lifer, which was a mighty fine thing to learn.

And Josh happens to have a new album out tomorrow. It’s called Spectral Lines. Go pick it up.