Tuning To The Right Path

Seems strange when you write about things you think are funny but secretly you keep in your head until for some unknown reason you throw it in the public domain.

For me, listening to tunes is the lifeblood of my living day. I need to listen to music. I’d even go so far as to say that twiddling the knobs to find the local radio station was acceptable if that was the only way to listen to music. My local radio station has a play list created in the mid-nineties and hasn’t for whatever reason ever changed. I sometimes spare a thought and create a scene in my head that a criminal breaks in every weekday and thrusts a shotgun at the DJ’s head forcing him to play, Texas, Natalie Imbruglia and Toni Braxton on constant repeat, forever.

I don’t know why but music to me is sacred (is it probably is to you), I guess I view it as ‘me’. Some way to describe me at that moment or how I view life, I do feel awfully melodramatic writing this shit, but at the same time I think I should write what I feel. You see I box songs in little metaphorical cubes to remind me of things. I’ve got hundreds of them, all personal to me. Sometimes though I talk about them because I feel like I should and then add what they mean to me. The recipient usually looks at me, pulls the stink face, and says ‘shut up’. Still I don’t give a fuck. That’s how I treat and handle music.

This evening I spoke about two boxes of music that I had stored in my mind. The first box was only created last summer. The tune was Coldplay’s “Life if Technicolour II”. I first heard shards of it on the album where they seemed to have cut up the guitar bit. That was one of my favourite parts of the whole LP. That guitar intro used to mess me up in July, listening to it as I walked along the canal. Inside I found it hard to contain all this bubbling of emotion that featured the luminaries of hope, fear, success and motivation. That’s what it did to me and that’s what I boxed and stored in my mind to eventually be filed in the hard drive of my subconscious.

Coldbrain whom I met for a few beers this evening probably didn’t realise that when “Life in Technicolur II” appeared on the ropey television it was one of the tunes that had a box. It’s strange but listening to that tune suddenly made me want to do something purposeful. I really like the song, I think it’s well written and the guitar rift makes me think, ‘shit that’s good’. What I did tell Coldbrain was that Underworld’s, Born Slippy was the tune that would boom around me if I ever had a million pounds, told my work , ‘see you later’ and walked out the building with a black holdall wrapped around my back wearing skin-tight jeans and a dodgy crew cut. That’s the song that reminds me of escape. From when I first saw it and watched Renton swagger down the street without a care in the world even though he should have been riddled with guilt, I thought that song was the bollocks. I wanted to feel what Renton must have been feeling. A bag full of money, no obligations to tie him to anywhere and a badass pair of plimpsoles, what else in the world do you need?

Writing about my boxes of music makes me feel that they will now not come true. It’s based on nothing whatsoever but still I feel that now I’ve written this, the tune will not play should I rob a bank, double cross everyone and walk away with the loot. So I deal with it by thinking I’m an utter mentalist and that there’s plenty of other songs that evoke many a feeling. So what if I never find myself bowling down the streets of London with a bag full of cash money I still picture myself in better situations, like when winning the lottery and cruising around the world to the beat of the Bar Kays ‘To Hot To Stop’.