WHY MUSIC MATTERS

In tenth grade, I told my parents I was going to a sleepover and snuck out to to see Metallica and Guns N'Roses at Giants Stadium instead. Live music played a big role in my life ever since, and I made it a point to see a few shows a year. Lineups ranged from the not-yet-famous No Doubt at a New York ballroom in the nineties to the full roster of bona fide rock stars at Bonnaroo in the early aughts (naughts? zeroes? whatever). For two decades, concerts were simply part of my being. Then I had kids and the music stopped for a little bit. It became too time consuming. Too expensive. Too much of a logistics nightmare. So two years went by without a single show. And it sucked. 

I missed seeing live music. Everything about it. Drinking beers in the parking lot with my friends. Hearing songs you've played over and over in your car take on new life. Being in a room with thousands of people on the same emotional wavelength. There's simply no substitute for it. So this year, I decided that - the sky-high price of babysitters be damned - I'm going to see some shows again. 

Because music matters. And the older I get, the more I realize how music has shaped the way I look at the world. That icy fear of a life without meaning. The urge to follow a path of personal joy even if it meant making some professional sacrifices along the way. I can trace those feelings back to stories I heard in a handful of songs. One of them, Radiohead's "No Surprises," inspired the birth of this very site. Another one is Pink Floyd's "Time." I first heard it in my teens, probably on the stereo of a friend's cool older brother, but it didn't really hit home until my twenties, when I started really wrestling with that question of what the rest of my life was going to look like. Just last month, I finally got to see it performed live by Roger Waters. When the familiar words came pouring through the speakers, I felt awed and moved and most of all, grateful that things had turned out alright. 

TIME 

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over
Thought I'd something more to say. 

Home, home again
I like to be here when I can
And when I come home cold and tired
Its good to warm my bones beside the fire
Far away across the field
The tolling of the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spells