Friday, June 21, 2013

Music and my heart


You're probably going to think I'm the biggest whackjob there ever was for saying this, but here goes. I love Mumford and Sons, but I find that I can't listen to more than one or two songs of theirs at a time. It's not just them either, it's several artists. They just evoke an emotion in me that makes me....sad. At first I just thought it was Tori Amos because her subject matter (Me and a Gun, Your Cloud and Toast immediately come to mind) is often depressing and dark. And then I thought...maybe it's not the content alone, but memories. Sarah McLachlan was ruined for me because I listened to her during a phase when I was going through a break-up and life changes, but no....I had only heard one or two Mumford and Son song and I loved them...so I put them on Spotify and found...they made me sad. I would like to blame Bluegrass as a whole, but I can't. Bluegrass normally makes me giggle or slightly nauseated. It's weird and makes me wonder if the music grabs some part of my soul or heart strings and pulls it with certain chords and refrains. Mumford and Sons on the whole makes me think of a tragic dramatic film score where there's this beautiful woman and her strong man goes away to war and just when she thinks him dead, he appears...travelworn and somehow older, but she finds that he smells the same when she embraces him and she has tears in her eyes as she re-introduces him to their children in the hot summer sun as tears of joy stream down her face.

I don't know why I can see this scene when I hear their music. It just does. Perhaps it's the muse of my next novel speaking to me through them and I ought to lock myself in a room with my trusty laptop, Apple (it's a Dell actually, but it's Apple Green color) and bang this out into a rough draft. It would be a period romance for certain and actually probably not a romance at all, but a drama. Something I've never written before. It would require research of a time period I've often found interesting. And as I've written this, the name Allie strikes me. Allie or Alvie and perhaps Walter. I can feel it. I can feel the story. The heat of the sun on her skin and the solace she feels in his embrace, the way holding her quells the nightmares he's faced.

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