Here's the thing about music - you remember where you were when you heard it. And by remember, I mean there's an internal attempt at complete restoration of physical state. Sort of like when you wake up a computer from a sleep state instead of rebooting. So when you were having a great time with some friends, and a new song came on the radio, or the stereo, or the sound system at the bar, you go back to that internal state of being happy. The song bounces around inside you, restoring the past as best it can. Actually, it's no better than your actual memory, so the specifics of things die out after a while and all you're left with is the feeling.
It's why you can listen to songs you used to like years ago, and you remember liking them, but the internal jazz isn't there anymore.
I think music also has something to do with mental vibration. EEG. Brain waves. Low frequency EMF from the soul.
All of which is a long way of saying I saw Porcupine Tree at the Warfield a week ago. They were very good, and I liked them very much.
Their warm up band is called "3". They're a progressive rock group that sounds like a Rush tribute band. Very tight. Very well rehearsed. Very talented.
Unlike Porcupine Tree, their music sucked, in my opinion, which is probably fortunate because while I endured them I ached for the Tree so that when the opening strains of "Fear of a Blank Planet" started up, I was propelled into an ecstasy of moment. That moment. Sound waves giggled my innards to the beat of precision syncopated rhythms. Sunlight coming through the haze, I've tucked in the blinds to let it inside, the bed is all made so the music still plays.
"I like the way they have all that teenaged angst," she says to me.
"Steve Wilson is 40. He's been doing this for twenty years. Not giving up. Twenty years and he's playing to a couple hundred middle aged people reliving their progressive rock childhoods."
She: "There are plenty of young people here."
I said, "Thanks for coming with me. I know you don't like this stuff."
"Who said I don't like it?"
"You like jazz and folk. This is kind of loud."
"They're going to do another encore."
look in her eyes when open car starts: I like this makes him so happy
unheard beneath the guitars: "Damn, I love this song. It reminds me of you."
'Nothing like this felt in her kiss cannot resist her fell for her charm lost in her arms I keep a photograph give me a glimpse let me come in be there inside her here it begins here is the sin something to lie about.
I got wiring loose inside my head, I got books that I never ever read...
Though my favorite Porcupine Tree song is Trains and they didn't play it.
It contains the best song lyric ever written.
When the evening reaches here
You're tying me up
I'm dying of love
It's okay.
The first time I heard Trains, I remember exactly where I was. I remember wondering how to classify what I was feeling.
And then, there it was and I couldn't say anything about it.
So I played the song over and over.
And said the words to myself.
Remembering lying beneath curtains fluttering on a breeze.
See, I have been fortunate enough in my life to have been consumed. It's happened more than once. Maybe I'm prone to it.
It's one of the most awful conditions to adore.
Better than sex.
Passion for another.
If they diagnose me with cancer, and I find out I'm going to die and my brain is so preoccupied that I can't write anymore, I want to say, while I still can, that I realize all I could have ever wanted in my life is for someone to feel about me the way I felt writing the things I loved to write, thinking about you.
You make me want to write poetry.
You make me afraid.
You make me want to create something so beautiful it collapses the earth within mighty gravity, annihilating everything precious and historic, every sigh a baby ever made, every glistening smile - all into a dimensionless eternity from which a brilliant new universe explodes in thermonuclear delight that remembers nothing of us.
Thus, life itself would be born.
And if you didn't exist
I would create one exactly the same.
As you turned out
After all these years.
And if I'm okay and live for a while longer.
Well.
Then.
You make me want to die trying.