Music is Medicine
In the 5th grade I had a hype song. Except we didn’t have earbuds. Or headphones. This was back in the Land Before Time when telephones were still plugged into the wall with a curly cord connecting the receiver to the base. So mobile music was a ways away, which meant the hype had to have some shelf life. Fortunately, brain cells are pretty spongy when you’re ten. And Helen Reddy’s Australian accent was super sticky, so it worked out for me. I was completely convinced she was the reason I always won the free throw contest held at halftime in the tournament at Zaneis, the gym just south of Healdton at the school that had no town. I was a baller in two pair of knee socks with blue stripes around the top, the first pair pulled tall and tight, the second folded strategically so the stripes covered the ankle laces of my canvas high top Chucks. I carried a royal blue and white zippered gym bag, with handles, and a feminist fight song in my head. To this day when I hear “I Am Woman”, my insides shift, and I am running onto the court in a Bulldog blue uniform with a basketball under my arm. Trisha Yearwood pegged it perfectly, the song does remember when.
Music is so easily and readily accessible now. If you hear a song on the radio, you can download it on your phone in seconds. The tunes travel invisibly through our devices, always on stand-by for what we want or need to hear. They just line up like taxi cabs at the airport waiting to be our chariot to wherever it is we’d like to go. Teleportation just might be music’s ace. It can get you into places that don’t seem to have a door.
And it does what it does in a variety of ways. I have an ongoing argument with a dear friend about what, specifically, makes a song great. He says it’s all about the music; I say the lyrics matter most. We both agree, however, that there are pyrotechnics when those two works of art collide. Rick Beato has an entire YouTube channel committed just to that conversation—it’s called: “What Makes This Song Great”. (Gotta love a title that doesn’t beat around the bush). Beato is a master musician. In his videos, he strips instruments away from one another, drawing attention to double tracking and hidden guitars, while singling out the harmonics and the drum fills that make a song a song. Beato has a reverence for the process and a deep abiding appreciation for the gravity of the parts. But you don’t have to know what he does to feel a song move through your soul.
“I Am Woman’ became my fight song when I was ten, not because it was a feminist anthem per say-- I had neither the context nor the capacity to understand the statement it was making in the midst of the women’s movement in 1972. But it did make me feel empowered. Maybe it was the subliminal effect of the lyrics, or the crescendo bravado of the brass. Or maybe it was the passion in Helen Reddy’s voice-- that emotion that cannot be dissected from the vocal cords of people who believe in what they sing. All I know is that it’s in me. And every time I hear it, (shout out to Dr. Hook) it just convinces me more.
Music is the clothesline we pin our memories on. I have a million waving in the wind about my brother and me. When we were growing up, we each amassed quite impressive collections of ‘little records’, the name we used to refer to the 7-inch 45 rpm vinyls with singles on each side. We fought too much to share them so we each saved up our money and grew individual libraries for ourselves. One of the biggest knock down drag outs we ever had was over who irreparably scratched ‘Band on the Run’. I think I chased him down the hall with scissors.
Little records were fantastic. They had an ‘A’ side and a ‘B’ side, the ‘A’ being the track the producers thought would make it, and the ‘B’ being one they doubted ever would. And that’s typically the way it worked out, although there were a few exceptions. The ‘B’ side of Terry Jack’s classic, ‘Seasons in the Sun’, was some song called ‘Put a Bone in it.” And the ‘B’ side of the one that caused the greatest sibling feud of my childhood was ‘Zoo Gang’, a song Paul McCartney, no doubt, humbly credited to the Wings. ‘Beth’ by KISS was an exception, as it was a ‘B’ side song. So was the iconic ‘Unchained Melody’ and Rod Stewart’s ‘Maggie May’. But mostly ‘B’s were duds. They were the two for one not worth much on the backside of the hit. I can retrace my becoming by the labels of my favorite singles, though, whichever side they were on. They are woven through ‘the backroads by the rivers of my memory’—gentle-- just like Glen Campbell said, ‘ever smilin’, ever gentle on my mind.’
When my now grown children hear Savage Garden on the radio, or Hanson sing “MMMBop”, they turn it up and sing at the top of their lungs, and I swear their faces grow freckles as it takes them back to summers on a ski boat at the lake.
Everybody has a song--and a playlist (or two dozen)—that plucks them up from where they are and plops them down in where they were when they first heard it. Or at least within the season of their life that it defines. Music marks our biggest moments for sure—we all remember the songs from prom or our wedding or what we sang when Granny died. But it also marks the mundane just the same. When my now grown children hear Savage Garden on the radio, or Hanson sing “MMMBop”, they turn it up and sing at the top of their lungs, and I swear their faces grow freckles as it takes them back to summers on a ski boat at the lake. I find it extraordinary how clearly songs can play a re-run of our most common days.
This past season of Covid instilled some silver lining habits for our family beyond the mandatory hygienic improvements of washing our hands and covering our mouths when we sneezed or coughed. It instituted family dinners. And family dinners brought back songs. Family (and close friends who might as well be) all convened once a week to eat and laugh in the middle and cook and clean on the ends. The cooking and cleaning are where the songs come in. Everybody contributed their favorites to a playlist that gets shuffled as we sing, full throated, all the words without ever needing to think. And why would we? They, along with the guitar riffs, are imprinted in our brains. My kids laughed at a few the first time we all sang them, and I had to ask for word clarifications in spots of some of theirs, but, quickly, we all fell into each others’. Singing loudly, dancing poorly, living fully in the moment marked by ABBA, Linda Ronstadt, a little Journey and a little more of Queen. I find it almost impossible now, thanks to our playlist, to wash the dishes without singing, “…I was drunk, the day my mom got out of prison…” Thank you, David Allen Coe, for writing what might indeed be the perfect country and western song, and for steeling us together even tighter while the outside world around us came unwound.
My strength coach used to say “movement is medicine”, but I think music is. It lifts and sorts and soothes and heals. It inspires and emboldens. It gets us to the center circle for the tip and to the plate for an at bat…and down the aisle and to the stage and in the ground when what we started here is finished and we’re done. It grows in every crevice of the sidewalk along the journey of our lives, giving shape to stories that need edges and arranging complicated notes and lyrics so that we can tell each other all the things we have no other way to say. Music sets up shop inside our chest cavity, riding on our breath and dancing in our eyes. It becomes a part of our DNA. ‘I’ve got the music in me’, sang Kiki Dee. Did she ever! With or without Elton John.
So do I. And so do you.
Sherri Coale
P.S.
