“What I had almost remembered was uncommunicable forever.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald
I’ve always felt a kinship with birds. They spend their entire lives traveling the world, foraging for food, searching for a mate - trying to survive. They even get drunk sometimes (google it). Most importantly, they’re always singing.
Birds don’t just sing for the ‘sake of the song.’ Their songs are often a matter of life or death. One specific tone might indicate an intruder near a nest. Another might warn of a predatory hawk’s descent. Without these songs, survival is impossible.
Is it hyperbolic to suggest that our own survival is also reliant on songs? Maybe. Yet we can’t seem to stop writing them. Every day tens of thousands of new ones appear online, many of them to be streamed a dozen times and just as quickly forgotten. But just like those birdsongs, they might be pretty darn important to those who listen, if only for a few minutes.
Cliche as it may be, music does express things that can’t be expressed in words. Anyone can send a text that says “I love you,” or “I wish things happened differently.” Finding that feeling through music, however, is something else entirely - a way of keeping our spirits high and warning us of the predatory creatures looming above our hearts and minds.
So all around the world, people keep picking up guitars, microphones, laptops - whatever, and trying to trying to make things just a little bit better through music. I think it’s important that we all keep doing so, lest what we want to express truly remains uncommunicable forever.