There are several reason why I’ll pick a song as one I like, but for the most part what really attracts me, what really makes the song one of my big favorites is grandeur. I love song that come together in an attempt to move you, because I feel it shows how much effort if really being put into the song. It’s not just words being thrown out into the world, meaningless and hollow, in an attempt to make some cash. They convey some feeling, some deep emotion that only you can truly understand, but can be described to an extent both lyrically and musically.
There are many ways to come to this climatic feeling in a song, but I’ll focus on just one for today. There are some things in the world that are more easily translated into beauty than others. When something that is difficult to “explain beautifully” is explained beautifully, it make for this feeling, especially in music. This is why love is a major launching board for great songs. You may disagree and say “love is one of the things most easily made beautiful,” but that’s not what I’m getting at. It’s easy to make love beautiful, It’s not so easy to explain love properly, or rather, explain the love that your feeling, but when you get those two things: The type of love that you are feeling explained properly, and the feeling explained with beauty, you get one hell of a love song, and it’s a thing of amazement
Another thing that is hard to “explain beautifully” is science, for science is meant to remove the cloak of beauty and show what is truly there. So turning the destroyer into what it is in fact destroying is no easy task, and rarely done well. Impossible, however, it is not, and I present to you this case: Jason Mraz’s “Bella Luna.” The song (about the moon, based on a poem about the moon he asked a friend to write) is a really sweet, beautiful song, but here’s the thing. It’s almost scientific. Some lines from it “A chosen child of the golden sun.” means that the moon does create light of it’s own, it just reflects light off of the sun. Another line is “You are an illuminating anchor, to leagues of infinite number, crashing waves and breaking thunder.” meaning of course that the moon’s gravity controls the tides.
I love stuff like that. It’s so correct, so perfectly in sync with how things really are, and yet it’s beautiful at the same time.
Anyway, today’s music recommendation: ”Stop This Train” by John Mayer, nothing like a song about getting older, for those getting older.
The post title comes form “Sweetwater Texas” by Fastball.
