Just a Theory

We love questions. Or maybe we just obsess over the unknown. If we don’t know something, we will go out of our way to find out what, why, how, and who. Loose ends are messy and leave us feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfied. So much of our lives are dedicated to finding answers to questions and making sense of things that often seems completely random and arbitrary.

What sets humans apart from the rest of nature is the ability and the innate need to tell stories. They tell us about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Music follows these same conventions.

Music has a beginning, a middle, and an end. It’s born of something less concrete than atoms and molecules yet lives a life that mirrors our own. There is struggle, conflict, creation, and destruction, all happening in a way that we can’t reach out and touch with our hands. Sometimes there are neatly packaged episodes, wrapped up, tied off with a bow and delivered directly to your front door. Other times, there are scrambled messes that leave us wondering what just happened and not knowing whether we should carry on or abandon the story.

It’s as human as anything we do. Music can give us goosebumps at just the right moment. It can somehow explain a feeling we can’t seem to pin down. It can define entire chapters of our lives. It can put us to sleep or it can fuel revolution. It predates language, organized civilization, and maybe even homo sapien itself, and it’s everywhere.