An Open Letter

I used to think that music was like magic, in the way that if you learned how it worked then the magic would disappear. It would be replaced with another kind of appreciation, one for the design — but the visceral element of it would disappear and never come back. that’s what made me afraid to learn more about music; I never wanted to lose that wonder. But the more I learn, the more I realize how wrong I was. Every time I’ve learned something new about music, every example of it becomes an additional piece of love, and thought that goes into something already beautiful. You can eat a cake, and appreciate the fact that a baker made it for you with love. But imagine learning and getting to meet the farmer who gathered the eggs for your cake, or the trucker that drove eight hours to get those eggs to the right location, or even the engineer that planned out the logistics route that enabled this transfer, and it keeps going. I don’t know about you, but each additional layer makes me feel loved and seen in a way I didn’t think it was possible. I think it’s such a beautiful human thing to see how much comes together to make something so beautiful. Except in this case the farmer is the drummer, with hands cramping putting there heart into the foundational rhythm and energy of the song, even when it’s immediately overshadowed. maybe the baker is the lyricist, figuring out how to put an experience into words much like a poet. Each new musical technique is an exploration into this shared human brain together. I don’t know what I’m saying with any of this but all I know is music is nothing like magic in the sense where learning more about it doesn’t ruin it. Instead learning more gives you an additional color to see all of these love letters written to the human experience.