When I was younger, I thought that my dad was about one hundred percent cooler than my mom. She wouldn’t let her my sister and I see a PG movie without prescreening it first (my sister and I always tried to cover up the ‘P’ when renting a movie; we thought we were complete geniuses and could never figure out why she would always laugh at our brilliant movie proposals) whereas my dad had a much more lenient approach toward what his kids saw in movies or heard in songs. This caused quite an upset when he showed us Star Wars – my main memory of this is about five years of confusion over why I wasn’t allowed to watch a movie I had already seen.
Something similar took place with regards to music: one of his favorite things to play was a mixtape of random AC/DC songs, but he never seemed to play it in the house as it didn’t mesh well with my mom’s Norah Jones-ish tastes. Instead, he would drive me around in his teal truck with the tape blasting. When we got home, I would try to be Angus Young; I would pick up my dad’sacoustic (how very hard rock) and listen to the tape in my room through an old, paint-spattered boombox and try to figure out the guitar parts. The only problem was my absolute lack of a musical ear: when I heard the guitar part go up, I just picked a note higher than the one I had been playing -- almost never got it right, but that didn’t deter me. I kept plowing along, playing bad approximations of killer riffs.
I wondered almost all the time why my versions of songs always sounded so horrendous. I could always tell that what I played was off, but I really couldn’t distinguish between different intervals, or distances between pitches. A bit of this probably stemmed from my complete lack of musical education or experience up till that point, but mostly I hadn’t figured out how to listen properly. I could hear the song as a whole, but had trouble distinguishing between the parts and figure out what each did on its own, which renders playing by ear much more difficult.
Even years later I’ll still sometimes have trouble sorting through the murk that arises when multiple parts coalesce. Much of this uncertainty can actually come from focussing too much on a single part. Trying to figure a single part out by ear takes a bit of concentration and after a while the rest of the song seems to fade away and all I can hear is that single guitar, bass, piano part, but not in a way that makes it easier to understand. Instead, what I expect to hear tends to get in the way of what is actually there, and what I already know is there can get in the way of what else is.
This happened when I began learning “I Might Be Wrong” by Radiohead. For a long time I listened to the song through the lens of guitar -- almost mentally playing along whenever I listened. While doing homework one day though, I put it on as background music and about a minute in I gave a little start as this textural bass part just creeped on in out of nowhere, leaving me to stare at my wall for a while feeling nonplussed.
My physics teacher used to always tell the class to “Get Zen with the problem.”, which applies perfectly to my experience hearing that bass part. It’s like being open to hearing things but not really reaching for them. By trying too hard to distinguish one aspect of song, everything else falls away, which in turn obscures the role of that specific part, but if I just let the sound wash over me in some sort of sh**ty-movie, overly nostalgic way, I can’t hear anything at all. Being present is maybe the most accurate way to describe it: not so invested that any one detail becomes more important than others, but not so detached that I don’t think at all; a way of being aware, in as much detail as possible, of what is happening around me.
By not being present enough in this way, the same ideas seem to cycle through my head over and over, so I have to make an effort to think new thoughts all the time. However, pursuing a thought or looking for a new one too intensely only ever yields banal results. I have never successfully force fresh ideas to form, instead they seem to appear in my mind when I am thinking in this present way. So, in a sometime self-indulgent pursuit of originality, I try to always live in this state of mind, so I can think in a way that allows me to more easily discern what is true or what is good and what isn’t as I see it.