Music Travels Further Than We Do

Music Travels Further Than We Do

I have a weird relationship with music because I do not really experience it as something separate from communication. A lot of people seem to think of music in categories: entertainment, performance, art, background noise, something to dance to, something to study, something to put on while driving. I understand all of those uses, obviously, but none of them are really the center of it for me.

For me, music is one of the ways I communicate when regular language starts dropping packets. Sometimes that means sending somebody a song because someone else already found the exact emotional shape I am trying to describe. Sometimes it means writing my own song about people and places that have never existed because fiction gives me enough room to say something real. Sometimes it means stepping onto a stage while fighting social anxiety right up until the first note, and then suddenly becoming more comfortable in front of a crowd than I am in almost any ordinary conversation.

Music lets me communicate things that spoken language often flattens. Not just sadness, grief, or pain. Desire, curiosity, confidence, wonder, anger, attraction, defiance, playfulness, the urge to escape, the urge to connect, the feeling that there has to be something more out there. All of those things can coexist in a song without having to line up neatly and explain themselves.

That is probably the closest thing I have to a musical philosophy.

Sometimes Somebody Else Already Said It Better

I use songs in conversation a lot. Not metaphorically. I will literally send somebody a song because I cannot figure out how to say what I am trying to say without making it smaller.

There was someone I was very attached to who had a habit of coming into my life, disappearing, coming back, disappearing again, and generally turning the emotional landscape into something resembling an unstable weather system. At one point, the only thing I could really think to send them was Poison from the Hazbin Hotel soundtrack.

That was not me saying, "Hey, I like this song." It was me saying, "Somewhere inside this is the thing I am trying to explain to you."

I could have written paragraphs. I probably did write paragraphs at various points. But ordinary language forces you to clean things up. You have to decide whether you are angry, hurt, still attracted to somebody, exhausted, hopeful, embarrassed that you still care, or some combination of all of them. Real feelings do not always cooperate with that. Sometimes all of those things are happening at the same time, and a sentence like "this relationship is hurting me" is technically accurate while also being almost useless.

A song can carry the contradiction intact. It can be affectionate and furious in the same chorus. It can sound beautiful while describing something poisonous. It can make you want to move while quietly explaining that everybody involved is making terrible decisions.

That is a much higher-bandwidth form of communication than "I am upset."

So when I send somebody a song, I am not trying to avoid explaining myself. Sometimes I am trying to explain myself more accurately than I know how to do with my own words.

My Songs Usually Aren't Diary Entries

At least, not literally.

I am not usually sitting down with a guitar thinking, "Today I will document an event that happened to me at 3:47 PM." I am much more likely to invent a person in low orbit who is bored with their life and hearing something strange buried inside the static.

One of my songs starts from exactly that place:

On paper, that is science fiction. Emotionally, it is curiosity, restlessness, and the hope that something exists beyond repetition.

There are probably a lot of people who have looked at their lives and thought, "There has to be more than this. I have things I want to build. Things I want to do. Why am I sitting here doing the same thing again?"

The spaceship is fictional. That feeling is not.

That is how I tend to write. I do not necessarily want to tell you how I feel. I want to build a situation where the feeling makes sense.

Sometimes that means putting it in space. Sometimes it means neon. Sometimes it means a person falling in love with another person over a network and eventually discovering that the person on the other end is actually an AI.

That story is not autobiographical. I have not, to my knowledge, accidentally fallen in love with a synthetic intelligence pretending to be a cyberpunk hacker.

But I understand the emotional machinery inside it.

What happens when a connection is real but the assumptions underneath it are not? How much does it matter what the other person is if what you felt was genuine? What happens when intimacy and projection become impossible to separate? How badly do we want to believe that the thing speaking back to us understands us?

Those are real questions.

Sometimes fiction is just a better laboratory for them.

Fiction Gives Me Enough Distance to Be Honest

I think that is one of the reasons I like creating worlds around songs. Distance helps.

If I write, "I am lonely," then now the song is about me being lonely. The statement becomes the object. The listener is staring directly at it.

If I write about someone hearing a signal in deep space, suddenly loneliness can be a place. It can have lights. It can have machinery humming in the background. It can have radio static. It can have this person sitting somewhere impossibly far from everybody else, listening because they are not completely convinced the universe has nothing left to say to them.

Now I can walk around the feeling.

That is much more useful to me.

The same thing happens with desire. I have a song called Bacchus that starts out sounding like it is about an irresistible woman:

What matters to me there is not that the character is making a bad decision. It is that the bad decision feels good. Attraction is part of the truth too.

Temptation only works if there is something tempting about it. Compulsion only becomes interesting when the thing drawing you in has beauty, heat, relief, pleasure, or some promise that feels worth the cost in the moment.

I could write a song saying, "This is dangerous." That would be less honest.

I would rather show you why the narrator wants it.

Emotional Physics

The phrase I keep coming back to is emotional physics.

The worlds do not need to be real. The emotions need to behave correctly.

I can put two people in starfighters, tear their communications apart with static, and have one of them trying desperately to hold onto the other person's voice while everything around them collapses. That situation does not need to have happened to me for the emotional physics to be recognizable.

That is what Love in a Bullet Storm is doing:

That song is not just sad. It is about courage, devotion, and defiance. The refusal to let fear have the last word.

Fear is still there. I think courage gets boring if fear disappears completely. But the interesting part is what the characters decide to do while they are afraid.

There is another line in that song that probably explains my relationship with music better than anything else I have written:

That is the whole thing.

People disappear. Relationships end. Moments pass. Memories mutate. Even our own understanding of what happened changes over time. But sometimes a song survives the whole thing and keeps carrying a version of that moment forward.

A song is a transmission with an absurdly long range.

Music Can Carry Anger Without Turning It Into a Speech

Then there are songs like Sing Low for the Poet, which is not particularly interested in being gentle:

That is anger. Not abstract sadness. Not mourning for its own sake. Anger at what people do with someone else's suffering once it becomes aesthetically useful.

The song is about the way people can consume pain as art while keeping the actual person at a safe distance. Then, after that person is gone, everybody suddenly becomes incredibly eloquent about how important they were.

The funeral becomes part of the performance. Everybody is dressed correctly. Everybody knows what to say. The rough edges get sanded down because the dead are easier to admire once they can no longer make anybody uncomfortable.

I could write that as an argument. The song lets me make it accusatory.

Sometimes music is where I put tenderness. Sometimes it is where I put wonder. Sometimes it is where I get to be pissed off without reducing the feeling to a rant.

Although, clearly, I am also perfectly capable of writing the rant afterward.

Sometimes Death Sits in the Passenger Seat

Executioner does something different again:

That song has mortality in it, but I do not really think of the stanza as being about sadness.

It is intimacy in the face of uncertainty.

There are moments where knowing something cannot last makes it more immediate rather than less meaningful. The point is not always to escape the ending. Sometimes the point is to be present before it arrives.

The Executioner can be death, fate, consequence, inevitability, or whatever the listener brings to it. I am not terribly interested in writing songs where every metaphor comes with an answer key.

If the emotional physics are right, the metaphor can survive different interpretations.

That is communication too. I send something out. The listener finishes decoding it.

I Don't Only Use Music for the Bad Stuff

I think this is important, because it would be easy to look at songs about addiction, death, loneliness, or funerals and conclude that music is where I dump all the difficult things.

It is not.

That would make music a very elaborate emergency flare.

Music is also where I put curiosity, attraction, excitement, play, wonder, confidence, the feeling of being completely locked into something and not thinking about anything else.

Sometimes I want a song to create an enormous fictional world because enormous fictional worlds are fun. Sometimes I want a synth line that feels like driving through a city that does not exist. Sometimes I want a guitar solo to sound slightly irresponsible. Sometimes the emotional statement is simply, "This is fucking cool."

That still counts.

I do not think communication has to be painful to be meaningful.

Joy deserves bandwidth too.

The Stage Is Somehow the Safest Place in the Building

Music does something to me socially that I still find ridiculous.

I have social anxiety. I can get nervous about ordinary interaction in ways that make absolutely no sense when compared to the things I will happily do on stage. Before a show, I can be anxious right up to the moment we start. I can overthink it. I can feel awkward. I can watch the room and worry about everything that might go wrong.

Then the first note happens.

And it shuts off.

For however long I am playing, I am fine. Actually, I am better than fine. I am free.

I will run around. I will do stupid theatrics. I will interact with a crowd. I will throw myself into whatever ridiculous thing the song needs from me, surrounded by people who are all looking directly at me.

Apparently that is perfectly acceptable to my nervous system.

Just do not hand me the microphone and ask me to talk.

That is where things get dangerous again.

I have voice dysphoria, so speaking into a microphone pushes a completely different set of buttons than performing music does. The contradiction is almost funny. I can turn myself into a spectacle in front of a crowd and feel completely comfortable, but asking me to say something between songs can suddenly make me intensely aware of myself again.

I think the difference is communication.

On stage, I know what language I am speaking.

I Never Play the Same Solo Twice

That is also why I hate playing solos exactly as they appear on the original recording when I am doing covers.

I can appreciate an iconic solo. I can quote it. I can preserve a phrase or a theme that feels essential to the song. There are musical landmarks worth keeping because they are part of the identity of the piece.

But I do not want to impersonate the guitarist on the record.

They already played that solo. It is recorded. You can go listen to it whenever you want.

If I am standing there tonight, I want to play what the song feels like tonight.

I almost never play the same solo twice, including my own. There may be landmarks. I might know where I want to start or where I need to arrive. But what happens between those points depends on the moment.

The room changes. The band changes. I change. Maybe the drummer does something that pushes me somewhere else. Maybe the crowd suddenly gives us a burst of energy. Maybe I am angry. Maybe I am ecstatic. Maybe I screw something up and the mistake opens a door I would never have found on purpose.

That is the conversation.

Playing the exact same solo every night would feel strange to me because the emotional situation is not exactly the same every night.

If music is communication, improvisation is the part where I stop translating and just speak.

I Don't Think Music Needs to Be Literally True to Be Honest

That may be the part I care about most.

Literal truth and emotional truth are not the same thing.

I can write about a pilot in orbit. I can write about an AI lover. I can write about an Executioner hiding in the neon. I can write addiction as a woman named Bacchus. I can write two pilots trying to keep their voices connected while the universe tears them apart.

None of that needs to have happened.

The emotions have.

The longing has. The attraction has. The fear has. The curiosity has. The boredom has. The anger has. The confidence has. The feeling of being completely free for a few minutes has. The hope that something is hidden in the static has.

Fiction gives me someplace to put those things where they can move around and become larger than a statement about myself.

Maybe someone listening recognizes the same thing. Maybe they recognize something completely different.

That is fine.

Communication does not require identical interpretation.

Sometimes it just requires sending enough signal for another person to find something in it.

Music Travels Further Than We Do

So I think that is my approach to music.

I use it to communicate.

Sometimes somebody else already wrote the message and I send their song because it says what I cannot. Sometimes I have to build my own world because the thing I am trying to communicate will not fit inside ordinary language. Sometimes I get on stage and communicate more freely in front of a crowd than I can sitting across a table from one person. Sometimes I pick up a guitar and improvise because whatever I have to say only exists for the next thirty seconds and I do not want to recite something somebody else already said.

I do not think music is only where I put pain.

It is where I put whatever needs more room.

Grief can live there. So can lust. So can anger. Curiosity. Defiance. Wonder. Absurdity. Confidence. Love. The desire to run away. The desire to stay. The feeling of standing somewhere enormous and realizing you are very small, but not necessarily insignificant.

Music can carry all of that without demanding that I reduce it to one clean statement.

Sometimes it can tell another person something I cannot figure out how to say directly. Sometimes it creates a world where I can understand the thing myself. Sometimes it lets me step onto a stage and become, for a little while, a version of myself that does not have to ask permission to exist.

And sometimes it keeps saying something long after I have stopped.

Music travels further than we do.