a house made of nostalgia

i fall in love with a song

i play it endlessly for days

because through it i go somewhere else

somewhere beautiful

where there is grace

and i wiki its origins, its background, i pore over the comments on the youtube clips of it, i pore over the ideas that listeners have of it's meaning, i look for photos of the musicians, i seek to feel like part of the community of listeners.

and all because i have lost parts of my soul

after the great disintegration

sometimes i find pieces of it locked inside songs

and can only go view it through a glass darkly

by listening

i usually find in my researching that a musician has a strong past experience or childhood in common with me.

it explained why my brothers, stepbrother, and i listen to Skillet music, frontman John Cooper had the same kind of loss and family stuff in his adolescence that we had in ours. when i read that i had already been experiencing for years that his music assaults my soul and intensely loves me - it is daunting.

in the case of my most recent crush, i found that though the entire album was instrumental, it had been created about the ghosts that we create out of lost people and eras.

"The album title has to do with chasing after symbolic shadows, as in reflections of things and not the reality. They might be reflections of the past or losses that linger in our lives but are no longer real. We don't beleive in ghosts--living with a ghost to us just represents living with the memories of events or people who have died in your own life. The album takes up the theme of impermanence, and I think that the sooner we embrace our own impermanence, the more meaningful our lives become."

i know my entire creativity is attempting to record the ghosts. i chase after reflections, writing poetry about shadows, creating online photo albums and blogging, all about shadows, about that which is only a suggestion of something real, as a shadow describes an object but does not exist.

“I'm fascinated with structures that are being reclaimed by nature – by weeds, vines, some force of nature pulling down a manmade object...I see beauty in it. Hammock's music is like that.”

seriously! It's just music. How did my soul know that the artist was thinking that when they made it? My entire art is all about showing beauty that was previously obscure and undiscovered. My grandmother's art too; my mother reckons she must have painted every rusty shed in all of Otago....and the aforementioned musicmen talk about zen and francis bacon and that beauty which you only find in pain and sorrow in the making of the album, all things which i am passionate about but usually fail in trying to communicate or bond with people over.

my house of nostalgia is bleeding on me, but i dont mind.