I woke up this morning with these thoughts in my head so I wrote them down:

Here’s to
– music as a lifelong endeavor and part of personal growth
– the passion of music
– the flow of music in time
– the mathematics and science of music
– music’s ability to express anything
– the physicality of playing music
– the physicality of the dance in music
– the disembodied selflessness of feeling in the moment that you are only in service of the music, of wanting that phrase or sound to express what it wants to express, of making the music “happy”
– the communality and liveliness of a concert and putting on a show
– the ephemerality and unpredictability of the live moment in music
– the many hours of preparation and work before a performance
– the sculpting of sound and music in the recording studio
– the complexity of recording and making recordings, the spontaneous and the mulled over, the purity of focus and the act of documenting people, the making of a thing like a book or film or painting
– beautiful tones
– breathing and furniture creaking
– listening to lots of music
– sometimes not listening to music
– talking and writing about music
– not talking and writing about music
– thinking about anything
– the ambience of a casual concert
– the ambience of a formal concert
– meeting with and talking with people at and after concerts
– being alone with your thoughts after playing or hearing a concert
– entertaining while enjoying and responding to an audience’s responses, facial expressions, applause
– becoming unaware of anything at all but your innermost, nonverbal feelings while playing, the deepest emotions tapped into by the music
– discovering unfamiliar music
– playing pieces you know many times
– wanting to give people a terrific and fun experience for those couple of hours
– an easy phrase or flourish
– sharing music as a communally cathartic, non-escapist confronting of serious reality
– stretching your being by pushing your art forward while feeling the emotional ties to the past
– traveling a lot and being thankful for the ability to travel, which makes it possible to see different places, and mainly, to be with people
– enjoying the familiarity of home and treading the well-worn sidewalks of one of the world’s great cities
– recognizing life’s many facets and paradoxes
– when dealing with the murk of misunderstanding, working with others to reach the happiness of clarity, strength and integrity
– love of musicians

[This was originally a Facebook post in 2014 but it somehow disappeared. Thanks to John Darnielle, great musician and writer, who reposted it back then on his Tumblr.]