Breathe in Silvas

If you listen closely you can hear the music of time. Each passing moment is one note in the symphony, sometimes booming to a cresendo, other times dying down until it is barely perceptable. When you are alone you can only hear a small part of the melody, but if you open yourself up to too many people the resulting cacophony will drive you insane.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

The tide that can lift you up can also pull you down into the depths. Nothing is ever certain until it is over, and then you are only left with regrets for what was not, or joy over what was. Thus if you push off your decisions until you are certain about what you should do you will never do anything, and will be carried along by the tides of fate, subject to everything that it wants to throw at you.

Life is a series of fleeting moments that, once gone, recede until they are only hazy memories. Even those often can not be brought up at will, but only arise in response to triggers. Sometimes the trigger is a poem or a song, sometimes it’s a word or scent or a movement, and sometimes it’s a photo or a drawing or a sculpture. Many people chronicle their lives with photographs hoping that by capturing their lives that way they will be able to remember the events captured in those pictures. But relying on photographs to remember is like relying on a broken camera to take pictures-you never know what you are going to get. Sometimes when you look at a photo of yourself and you find that it has as little meaning to you as if it were someone else, and other times the memory it brings up makes you want to tear out your hair. Yet if you lose hold on your past you have nothing left to do but to go gently into the good night.

There is some music that you cant help but be moved by. It’s hard to describe sometimes but you just know it when you hear it. I can still remember the way I felt the first time I heard Yo-Yo Ma’s Cello suites, the way it lifts my heart up and transports me to a wonderful place. I felt the same way when I first listened to Lucie Silvas first studio album Breathe In, when I got it I listened to it straight though the first time. Though her next album, The Same Side, did not sell as well as the first one, I found it to be entirely enjoyable. As we speak she is working on her next album, and if the demos that have been released already are any indication I think that it will surpass even her first album.

I don’t know what the question is, but music contains the answer. When you don’t know what to do-listen to music. When something bad has happened-listen to music. When something great is happening-listen to music. When something important is about to happen-listen to music.
In music you can find hope and comfort. Great music lifts you up beyond the place you are in and lets you see more clearly. And if it cant do that at least it can take you away to a wonderful place-if only for a little while.