Standing Right Next to Me

Grammar disclaimer: I go back and forth from present tense to past tense even in the same paragraphs. Same with you/me. I feel better with your knowing that I know that.

I listen to a lot of music.  In my car I listen to Sirius/XM satellite radio. Besides stations that are dedicated to a particular type of music is that the music is mostly commercial free. There is a trade off from FM radio, however, in that the sound quality of XM is not as rich as FM.  It's a trade off that I gladly make. I also listen to Spotify playlists from my phone. The trade off there is that it uses data and the overages are very expensive. I occasionally listen to a CD, but I find that the other two options give me plenty of music to listen to.

The best sound quality that I experience is at home with my  Bose headphones.  My Bose world is a solitary world of a thousand delights. In that world I listen to Spotify most of the time and also YouTube videos.  After using the free service from Spotify for quite awhile, I decided to subscribe so that I could enjoy the music commercial and interruption free. And I certainly get my money's worth.

In case you do not use Spotify, and the thing that makes it superior to Pandora (in my opinion), is the magic search box at the top of the page. The user can type the name of any artist or song and the page immediately populates with that artist's music.  You can immediately listen to that one song or an entire symphony. There is no end to Spotify's music. It's  offerings seem to be as vast as the stars in the heavens.

One thing I do with Spotify and videos is follow the musical trails that the services prompt me to follow. By doing that, I have found incredible music by artists and bands that I had never heard of.
This happened just yesterday evening. The way this works is that I listen to a YouTube video of the Spotify song I just enjoyed. After that video plays, I just let it keep playing the next song. In many cases YouTube continues to play the music of that artist, but it eventually plays music of other artists. That's when I discover the new music. Such was the case last evening. I forget who I was listening to that led me to the music of Glen Campbell. There I discovered the universe of music by Jimmy Webb which led me to Linda Rondstadt. And there I found the mother lode in the music of Karla Bonoff. If I had ever heard of Bonoff,  I don't recall.  Turns out that she wrote many of the biggest hits by Glen Campbell,  Linda Rondstadt and so many others. Then I found videos of Bonoff singing her own music.  Her voice is amazingly like Rondstadt's.

I was enjoying Karla Bonoff's music anyway when I surfed into her "Standing Right Next to Me." Now I have the children in my life to thank for what I did next. If children like a song or a movie, they watch it over and over again.  Sometimes they watch the same movie that they just watched.  So in a case like this, I have listened to this song probably fifty times since last night. I'm listening to it now. Is it primarily the lyrics or the music that I enjoy the most? With a good song obviously you can't separate the two. The song is about the age old poetic subject of love, but approaches the subject in a remarkable refreshing way. The thing that's "standing right next to me" is not that special person, but its love itself. Then as you think about it, it's the love for and from that special person that you feel. And the music fills me with that love that she's singing about.

The thing about music for me is not just how it sounds, but what it does. I struggle with emotions. Usually I either feel really good or I feel really bad. There is very little in between. I work very hard to feel good.  This song helps me to feel the love that she's singing about.  I am flooded with the goodness of love, the goodness of life. That's why I listen to it over and over. I find that feeling to be an antidote to my chronic pain and suffering(in the Buddhist sense). For all of my life I have "self-medicated" with music. No destructive addictions or jail time. It's hard for me to believe that prescription pain killers are any more effective than my music method.

I'll leave with my thought for the day. Whatever it is that you need today for love and fulfillment is standing right next to you. Touch it.  Embrace it. Enjoy it. Live it. And by all means, subscribe to Spotify.