Welcome to The Dusty Music Bin

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

This past holiday season I was gifted a book called I Heard There Was a Secret Chord – Music as Medicine by Daniel J. Levitin. The premise of the book centers on understanding the science of how music as therapy may have real and measurable positive effects on our physical health. As I make my way through the book in little pieces, the science of it all being a little outside of my normal scope of reading, the idea that music is medicine is one I very unscientifically know to be true.

As I barrel toward the mid-century mark in age, accompanied by the mid-life mental maladies many feel—financial concerns, parenting issues, the rigors of daily routines, all with the specter of time ticking away—music has remained a steadfast salve that accompanies me on my daily journeys.

Growing up, music was a central part of my life, a focus of all my friend groups. The best days were spent piling into a car and driving around from music store to music store looking for rare cassettes and CDs to add to our collections. This was back primarily in the early nineties, at a time predominantly before the internet, before music downloading and streaming, and when sometimes you would find something in a music bin you had never heard of or knew existed but could quickly become a treasure or a mystery to experience as if you had discovered it.

Next came the desire to make music of my own, and various groups of friends buying instruments and trying to make songs before we barely had a lesson or knew how to play a chord. This led to more great times living in a world where a future making music and playing music for others was possible, times where the musical dreams of youth felt real—songs were recorded on cassettes on boomboxes, nights and weekends were spent in basements making noise and just having fun imagining what that could be like.

Then, as predictable as possible, life happened and I grew up and friends grew up and responsibilities took over, the need to make a living. But music never goes away. And there is nothing sad or wrong about it. That is how life goes.

Music is constant.

Evenings spent with my wife and my son, commutes to and from work, going for jogs, waking up on difficult morning and needing a boost, laying in the dark on sleepless nights, music is always there to make a nice night nicer, a tough day a little easier, and a moment of sadness a little more bearable.

In a recent conversation with my wife, having a starker than usual moment of mid-life malaise, I said something to the effect of how much I miss talking about music, how much I wish I shared music I wrote somehow, but how I always held myself back from really doing so. To which she replied with blunt and perfect support by stating at almost fifty years old it is a little ridiculous to hold myself back from trying anything because of what somebody might think of it or say about it. In other words, if not now, when?

Thus, The Dusty Music Bin, my new home to talk about music was born. What you can expect to find here if you return will be several distinct kinds of musical discussion. I plan to share thoughts on new music I discover throughout the year in hopes of dispelling the notion many have that there isn’t any high-quality contemporary music anymore. I’m going to share pieces about writing songs with links to sound files of demos I will be recording with hopes of eventually perfecting professional versions in a studio at some point. I’m going to write about what makes great songs, talk about songwriters and their methods, and blow the dust-off old vinyl records to share experiences with them. And as I make music and use different tools and gear, I’m going to talk about that too, not from the position of an expert, but rather as just a regular person using what I can to make the best songs I can. In other words, in any of the ways I will be using music for my own therapy, I will be trying to find ways to communicate it.

No matter your age, no matter your station, most of us can agree that life is hard, and the world we are currently living in feels like an endless bombardment of bad news and division. As I share these discussions of music with you moving forward, it is my hope that amongst this dusty bin of musical discussion, you as a reader might discover something you can take away for yourself to experience and explore, and just maybe a little cure for what ails you too.