When Music is the Muse

Soul-rise, Acrylic on canvas 30 x 36 inches

Music was her drug of choice. Loud enough to extinguish the darkness and layered enough to lose and find herself in over and over again. No matter what life threw at her, another world was always another song away. Real as rain. Even the same song opened up new worlds with every listen. Didn’t matter if it had been on loop till the cows came home. If she listened to the song and not to her memory of it, she noticed, it surprised her every single time.

Entire gangs of instruments with their own shenanigans cropped up between layers she thought she knew her way around by now. A flight here, a dip there, a splash here, a whisper there, a quick succession of plucked strings chased by a take-no-prisoners beat and the rasp of a voice that took charge in all its crackling candour. Riffs that saw right through her and notes that knew just where to land and how. Melodies meandering with a wantonness only absolute precision could pull off. All the while a cadence or two twirling at the corners, in humble punctuation that held everything together.

How did these entire conspiracies of sound come to pass? And how did they know so well their way around her insides? How did they manage to dance her to homes she never knew she had? Questions that only answered themselves with more questions every time she wondered. Until she decided that getting to the bottom of this mystery called music was less important than flying to the heights it flung at her feet.

May the music be with you