I firmly believe that music is not something you own, though it is something you can cultivate. Like an animal, you can train it and mold it to a certain style of life, but you can never look God or the Universe in the face and say, “This thing is mine.” In the same way, music isn’t owned. It’s created and it is shared. By discovering, selecting, collating, and categorizing our music collections, we are more like gardeners than collectors.
And as we tend to our music garden and it grows, it begins to show us things. During all its time on your phone, computer, CD collection, or on your various music listening apps or accounts, it has observed you. The same way shoes break-in, learning to surround your feet’s unique shape, your music starts to learn who you are. It is a give and take arrangement. One day, you finally hear that obscure lyric to a song you’ve loved for years. Then, a song plays right as you were thinking of putting it on to get it out of your head. On the flip side, your music is right there with you. Right as a bug hits your windshield on a road trip, the song lands on a perfect ping, surrounded by silence, so that bug’s life felt more poignant than the hundreds of others smearing the windshield. It may make you laugh or pause to consider the song differently. No listen-through is the same, especially the more your music listens to you.
And music is a very good listener.
Switching things to a larger scale: On the slow decline of a massive life climax—a breakup, a move, a death, whatever—it always feels like your emotions are full to the brim. They’re pressed against the thin film of life so it can intimately feel every brush, every stab, every bump on the road. You are essentially naked. As you drive in your car, totally plugged into the pattern of red lights in front of you and yellow lights blinding your peripherals, white-knuckle gripping the steering wheel, a song plays. It could just be your current state of mind or this particular red light or any combination of sensual correlations, but the song stops you. It pulls your heart up by its boot straps and it opens your eyes. The lyrics pour into you. And the silly thing is, you’ve heard this song before. Your music player will tell you you’ve heard it 300 times, not even counting the times you’ve heard it on the radio, on a CD, on your iPod, in a bar. This time is the time that matters. Because all those times you’ve listened to that song, it was also listening to you. It was paying attention when you skipped it, when you played it over again, when you searched for it in your library or on YouTube. It was listening, and so it knows you now. And it knew exactly when you should hear it again—when you needed to hear it again.
Your cultivation of things you love will one day heal you, you just have to let it happen.