One of my favorite episodes of the X Files is “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.” It’s about a man who can supposedly tell how someone is going to die and Mulder and Scully work with him to try to catch a serial killer who is fascinated with his own future. There’s a moment when Mr. Bruckman and Mulder are standing in the apartment of a murdered woman who collected dolls and Bruckman delivers the following lines:
“Why does anyone do the things that they do? Why do I sell insurance? I wish I knew. Why did this woman collect dolls? What was it about her life? Was it one specific moment where she suddenly said ‘I know…dolls.’ Or was it a whole series of things starting when her parents met that somehow combined in such a way that in the end, she had no choice but to be a doll collector?”
That episode always made me wonder, why are we the way we are? Nature? Nurture? A combination of both or the luck or curse of being born in a particular place and time? All of those things fall together and turn us into who we become. I have always been fascinated with the concept and it’s made me do a lot of self reflection. For me, I have always wondered why it is that music has always intrigued me in the way that it does. Many people enjoy listening to music, but for me it’s almost an obsession. I have always tried to figure out why and I talked about it my book If We Never Meet Again when I said about my childhood:
“For some reason, I also remember rain. We had this huge front room window and I clearly remember looking out and watching the rain fall on our driveway. I was captivated with the way each drop fell and pooled up around itself. I remember just standing there barely able to see over the ledge, watching, observing, and lost in the fascination of that moment desperately trying to understand what I was witnessing while listening to my mother’s music. It’s that perfect feeling that great music still creates for me even after all these years.”
When I wrote those lines a year and a half ago, I had an epiphany. Music, like all great art, has the power to move us. For me, it recreates that feeling of being “lost in the fascination of that moment.” Music is emotional resonance, and I can’t imagine living without it. In chapter nine of my book, I met a man who had been doing just that and I was blessed to be part of a special moment in his life that forever changed me.
Once I had to drive a patient to his new residence. He was forced to move to another assisted living and his only relative lived 20 hours away. I always felt bad for him because he used to just sit in a dark oppressive room always half asleep because of the medication he was on for his brain tumor. My marketer arranged for a company to move his things and I volunteered to drive him. It was a bright, beautiful, South Carolina Spring morning. He sleepily climbed into my truck and we began our morning journey. I asked if he wanted to listen to some music and he basically said “Whatever.” From my book:
I scrolled down to my “Classic Rock” playlist, hit shuffle, and then it happened. Boston’s “More than a Feeling” started playing. The slow fade in of the 12 string string playing the opening arpeggio, repeating the pattern, the bass, and then the drums leading into the first verse of the song which I typically took for granted. Mr. Davis sat up, rolled the window down, leaned back again and began to enjoy himself for what I imagine was the first time in a long time. For a man who literally sat in the dark and barely said anything, by the time he sang out “It’s more than a feeling, (More than a Feeling), When I hear that old song they used to play” he was alive in a moment of ecstasy, punctuated with drum fills on his legs. When he finally broke out the air guitar for the solo, he was truly reborn. For the next 45 minutes, through various songs, he sang lyrics that had obviously been etched on his heart the same way they had been on mine. It was a great drive.
I have been a fan of Boston since I was a four year old kid in my oldest brother’s room listening to their debut album on 8 track cassette back in 1976. I remember holding my brother’s white wooden Wilson brand tennis racquet like it was a guitar and rocking out to sounds none of us had really heard before. If you get a chance, get on Youtube and watch Rick Beato’s “What Makes This Song Great? More Than A Feeling.” He does a far better job than I ever could talking about the genius of Tom Scholz. He even plays an isolated track of Brad Delp’s vocals that will truly blow you away. As Paul Phillips wrote in the comments “No pro tools, no plug-ins, no copy and paste, no samples, no loops, one of the finest compositions ever” and I couldn’t agree more.
When I had time to reflect on those moments, I wrote “All we did was drive down the road with the windows down listening to some of the greatest music ever made. It was something so commonplace for me that had been stolen from Mr. Davis by disease and neglect. All it took was a 45 minute drive to reignite that dormant passion. One song in and he was reborn…But ever since then, whenever I roll down the windows and let the music flow over me, I always think of that moment and try to appreciate it like we always should.”
Do yourself a favor later on today. Go for a drive, roll down the windows, play whatever works for you, and enjoy the moment. Whatever is weighing on you, let it be for just a while. It will still be there later, but for that moment, enjoy. Like Mr. Davis taught me…without those moments, all we have is the dark room of all of our struggles. Sometimes we just need to go outside, roll down the windows, and rock on.
Matthew M Cornett 