Soundtrack

Inspirational song: Remember Me This Way (Edie Brickell and Steve Martin)

It has been years since I purchased a new album and played it over and over without tiring of it. Somewhere in my young adulthood, I lost the ability to hear new songs the first few times they're played around me, in such a way that they penetrate the noise and interference of a distracted mind. I thought it was gone for good. Very recently, that has started to change, and I'm finding the skill to appreciate new music again, in a wider range of styles than I would have expected from a woman in my demographic. That I find myself picking up everything from bluegrass to Macklemore lately, and absorbing it the first time through, shows a level of plasticity I never expected to find again. It's exciting and it seems to be feeding on itself, growing, and spilling into other forms of art and expression. 

The music I've played most in the last week is the album I picked up at the concert Monday night. I can't get enough of it. Having heard how the songs were born, with Steve Martin sending Edie Brickell little banjo tunes, and her letting them speak to her and tell her the stories they were meant to be, makes it even more endearing. There is a sweetness in all of it, exploring the softest of emotions in every story. In the listening, over and over, it has turned me ever more inward, not in a way to exclude the outside world, but to contemplate my impact on it, past, present, and future. It's the bluegrass blueprint for how I want to grow up. 

Last night I went to a comedy show with a group of people I'd never met before. When asked what I did, I introduced myself as a writer for the first time in my life. I have said during other periods when I had no paying job that I was going to call myself an artist, but I think this is the first time I actually did it. My instinct was to walk it back, and say that it was just a blog, but I'm not so sure anymore it will stay so small. Doing this every day has given me confidence that it might turn into more someday. I want to be remembered for what I created. I want there to be art left, when all is said and done.

None of this lends itself to a particular photograph, so I will follow Steve and Edie's example, and I will take the camera outside and let the story come to me. Maybe I'll run into one or two good ones while I'm there.