The Musical Revelation

I recently began taking guitar lessons. I phrase it that way because saying I recently started “playing guitar” would be too complimentary to the limited ability I’ve been able to pull out of my hands and fingers. But even this relatively tiny amount of music I have been able to play, and the little bit more I’ve learned about music and about the people who make music, since I started the lessons has opened a new window into the art of expression.

Music has always been something I enjoyed. There are certain things I know I like—the way a driving beat can push you through a song, or the way a nice melody can pull you through, or the stories told by the lyrics. I don’t limit musical likes (or dislikes) to one genre. I have placed at the same time in the little three-CD shuffler at home Nanci Griffith, the Cars and Asleep at the Wheel; The Gipsy Kings, Harry Connick Jr. and Dave Matthews; the Dixie Chicks, Counting Crows and Bon Jovi.

I’ve been to concerts by Sting, U2, James Taylor, Kenny Loggins, Robert Plant, Joan Baez, INXS, the Black Crows, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Tracy Chapman, Springsteen, the aforementioned Asleep at the Wheel and plenty more.

Until recently my experience listening to music on CDs and at concerts has been pretty much the same: the music has come at me and I’ve listened. Sometimes in the right frame of mind it has washed over me and given me peace, or it has energized me. I’ve listened to lyrics I admired and some I thought were ridiculous and contrived. But music has always been a thing done by someone else that I either enjoy or don’t, and I never felt a personal connection beyond identifying with a favorite song.

I think now that’s because I never knew anyone who really made music; I only knew people who played music. Consequently, I hadn’t paid much attention to where music came from—its roots. What was the genesis of a song line “Mr. Jones,” for instance, or “Fast Car?” I liken it to reading the newspaper before I started writing for one. It was just news that I read, without any consideration for how that paper got in my hands.

But starting in 2003 when we moved back to Chicago from New York and took an apartment downstairs from a self-styled country and western singer/songwriter named Urban Djin, and continuing recently with my group guitar lessons, I have met people who make music. They conjure it out of thin air. They’re not cover bands, although they cover songs they like; they are their own bands.

When we lived below Urban, he was working in the recording studio on his “Enabling Angel” album , and we could hear him practicing. We’d watch him perform at the Smoke Daddy on West Division on occasion. When he finished the initial studio work, he gave us a CD he copied from the studio master and asked us to listen to it and tell him what we thought. I didn’t know enough about music to give him any information that he could have really used, I’m sure, but it felt special to be included that way. It liken it to what Jonathan Lethem’s friends probably felt if he handed out drafts of “Motherless Brooklyn” looking for feedback.

I loved Urban’s CD; I still do. I don’t love every song, but by and large I think it’s musically adventurous and I respect him for having that inside him and I respect him even more for managing to get it out of himself and into a format that can be enjoyed by others. That’s the thing about music: you can write it, but it doesn’t really come alive unless someone plays it. Once that happens, it’s instant art.

The woman who teaches our guitar class, Lisa DeRosia, has her own band, Lush Budgett. I’ve not seen them play live, but I caught Lisa fronting the Hoyle Brothers western swing band a few weeks ago at the Empty Bottle. She played the second half of their show, Urban the first half, although I didn’t know Urban would be there. Anyway, Lisa and Lush Budgett have two albums out. They have a sampling of four of their songs on the band’s MySpace page. I finally had to buy the CDs on CD Baby because I kept visiting the MySpace page and skewing their listening numbers.

I don’t know Lisa at all beyond the reality that she took a group of nine people—most of whom had never even held a guitar until that first night of Guitar I class—and in eight weeks taught us to play some music. Our odyssey will continue with Guitar I Repertoire this month. But I can say this about her music: If I had never met Lisa and had instead stumbled upon the Lush Budgett MySpace page, or heard one of the CDs at a party or in a restaurant, I still would have bought these CDs.

Associating music with a person, for me anyway, changes the dynamic of my musical experience. Urban and Lisa wrote their stuff and played it. They translated feelings into art. The fact that the two of them are working people grinding it out in Chicago, just like the rest of us, heightens the experience of hearing the music come through the speakers.

I hear music differently now, and I am gaining an appreciation for music that is less produced and more raw, straight from the heart as opposed to being filtered through the recording industry and the mass market. I’ve been listening to a lot of Mark Kozelek recently, for instance, his Sun Kil Moon “Ghosts of the Great Highway” album, and other songs on YouTube. That’s raw, emotional stuff. The stuff of great writing.

Knowing about these people that they made this music I enjoy gives me added hope that I can one day accomplish the same thing in terms of expression with the printed word that others do through music.