An Autobiography in Music
“What...what is this salty discharge?” — Jerry Seinfeld, Seinfeld, “The Serenity Now”
So, I’m watching the Spock’s Beard Snow Live reunion DVD and I noticed this same salty discharge that baffled Jerry Seinfeld in the episode referenced above. It was in my eyes, blurring my vision, and trickling down my face. What the hell?
I’ve noticed that the older I get the more I’m affected emotionally by music and film — particularly the former. I don’t know if it’s that I never felt my feelings as a younger man. Perhaps I just matured emotionally very slowly (this would probably the most popular theory among the people I grew up with) or if I simply feel the depths of some emotions more viscerally than when I was younger.
I only know it seems weird. We’ll come back to the crying thing, but bear with me for a few thousand words, if you will. This is the story of how music has affected my life. It isn't comprehensive (I have way more anecdotes about it) but it's the broad strokes.
I have a long relationship with music. I remember sitting in front of a small toy record player very early in life. I might have been four or five years old. I had an odd 45 rpm record about a teddy bear burning up in a fire. I don’t know who it was by or the title, but I do recall the odd refrain:
Fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire everywhere!
I remember that refrain as being both catchy and absolutely terrifying.
The first “favorite song” I can remember was The Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” I must have heard it on the radio or something, as I don’t recall my parents playing The Beatles much in the house. I remember hearing them play some Sonny & Cher, Jan and Dean, Jay & the Americans, and the Beach Boys. My mom got into Barry Manilow after that and I liked some of his songs but overall never really became a fan.
I was still shy of my 10th birthday when I got a stereo for Christmas. It was a Sears model on its own stand with a turntable, an AM/FM radio receiver, an 8-track player, two small speakers, and a rack on which to keep my records. I was gifted three K-TEL records under the tree that year. Two of them were hits packages and one was Goofy Greats — a compilation of novelty songs like “Chewy, Chewy” by Ohio Express, “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron” by Royal Guardsmen, and “Mr. Custer” by Larry Verne. There were a couple of songs by the 1910 Fruitgum Company on it as well. The hits compilations were mostly pop and disco songs by artists like KC & the Sunshine Band, the Hues Corporation, Donna Summer, and Maxine Nightingale.
I played the hell out of those records and probably drove my parents crazy with them. I acquired a few 8-tracks by the Village People, John Denver, Foreigner, and other popular artists of the day. I specifically remember playing An Evening with John Denver a lot, completely mesmerized by songs like “Annie’s Song,” “Poems, Prayers & Promises,” and, of course, “Rocky Mountain High.” I’m not sure where the tape came from, but I suspect the involvement of my Aunt Yvonne — a huge John Denver fan.
I nearly wore out my Grease soundtrack record — the first album I can remember specifically asking for and receiving as a gift from my parents.
Still, no music had yet made me cry.
Like most kids, I gravitated toward some of the hits on the radio that were played when we were in the car. I remember falling in love with tunes like “Swearin’ to God” by Frankie Valli, “Listen to What the Man Said,” by Wings, and “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night)” by the Four Seasons. I still enjoy them to this day.
My best friend at Garfield Elementary was Scott Mirra, who now goes by his given first name, Travis (which really causes cognitive dissonance in my head — he’s always been Scott to me and may always be that). I had first seen the band Kiss on a Paul Lynde Halloween TV special, but Scott’s house was the first place I heard one of their albums. We played their Alive! album so much and, like many kids in the Midwest, I became a huge fan of the band, collecting their records like they were baseball cards. Scott and I would spin Destroyer, Rock & Roll Over, and Love Gun repeatedly, and he was a bigger influence on me than he probably realizes.
We used to listen to The Best of Bread (on 8-track, if memory serves) and I still love those songs to this day. Occasionally I still play Alan O’Day’s “Undercover Angel,” which is cheesy as hell but it’s a fun song and if I recall correctly, I first heard it from Scott playing that single for me at his house. I’m pretty sure Scott was the person who introduced me to April Wine, as well, a bit later. Thanks for the musical introductions, Scott.
Music seemed so mysterious in the pre-Mtv days. You had an album cover to look at. Sometimes it showed the artist and sometimes some other image. Some albums came with lyric sheets but many didn’t. I must have stared at Boston’s Don’t Look Back album cover for hours, pondering what it would be like to have a city inside a giant (guitar-shaped) spaceship and what cataclysm caused the people of Earth to mobilize entire cities and send them into space.
When I reached junior high age I recall hanging out with an older kid while on vacation and he invited me to stay over at his house. He would sleep with the radio on and that blew my mind. I remember (like it was yesterday) lying in the dark with only the numbers of the FM dial visible and listening to Todd Rundgren’s “Hello, It’s Me.” It was an amazing experience. That might have been the closest I came to tears from music while growing up.
I started to leave my radio on at night when I got back to Ohio. At some point I stopped doing that. I’m not sure when — it was years later, probably in high school. I stopped because it was costing me too much sleep because I’d start getting into the music and the next thing I know it would be 3 a.m.
Sometime in high school I got a new stereo. It was another Sears model — with bigger speakers — and essentially the same setup. I also got an adapter so it would play cassettes through the 8-track player. I turned to cassettes as my primary listening device. No more going back into town to return a record that skipped! I got my first cassettes for my birthday along with a portable cassette player (the Walkman hadn’t quite come out yet). The two albums I got were the self-titled Christopher Cross debut and Foreigner’s 4.
Mtv came along but we didn’t yet have cable TV at first. When it finally arrived, it felt like a movement rather than a television network. Here were these mini movies or short concert films that ran continuously 24/7/365. For some bands, it took away some of the mystery. For others, it added mystique. I watched that channel more than was healthy. I figured out if I used a coaxial splitter and touched one line of coax cable to the antenna behind my stereo, I could play it through my FM receiver. Using that method, I even recorded several 8-tracks’ worth of my favorites.
I have to admit that I swiped some of the tapes my parents hadn’t touched in at least a decade, put a piece of tape over the tab to make it recordable, then taped over those albums with songs from Mtv. (Sorry, Dad! Just like when I took your golf clubs. I’m an awful person.)
I wasn’t allowed to go see concerts until I graduated high school. The summer after graduation I saw my first couple of shows. The first was Sammy Hagar in Columbus with Dokken opening. Sammy was on his VOA tour and I’d been listening to the cassette for months. The show was loud, colorful, exciting, amazing, and…well, loud! After the show, my friends and I decided to leave our normal lives behind and become roadies for Sammy. We waited around and then tried to find a way backstage. Eventually we came to a gate and the guard told us to leave. We said we were looking to go to work on the crew and asked if there was someone we could talk to about it. The guard asked us to wait and said he’d go ask. About five minutes later multiple guards came along and shooed us out of the arena.
So much for our lives on the road with the Red Rocker.
The second show I saw was at Legend Valley — at least I think it was still called that back then. It went on to become Buckeye Lake Music Center at some point. It was an 80s heavy metal extravaganza, with the Scorpions headlining and getting support from Quiet Riot, Fastway, and Kick Axe. A friend of my sister’s got us into the VIP section, which was off to the right side of the stage, but with a great view. However, we were right in front of the stacks of speakers. I’m pretty sure I sustained significant damage to my hearing that day but I didn’t care. Each band was better than the last and all of them were great. Mathias Jabs’ guitar solos pierced my skull and I can still picture in my mind the sight of Fastway frontman Dave King throwing a Nerf football into the crowd and catching the return passes.
Mtv televised the biggest musical event of my life in July of 1985. I was still living at home after attending the local branch of Ohio State my freshman year. I got up early to watch the concert kick off from Wembley Stadium in London. I watched it all morning and into the afternoon but I had concert tickets of my own for that day. After seeing Bryan Adams perform a couple of songs on TV from Philadelphia, I went to Legend Valley to see him in person. Unfortunately, it meant that I missed some of the Live Aid broadcast, but I recorded part of the show on VHS to watch when I got home.
I amassed so many cassettes in my high school years that I sometimes struggled to decide what I wanted to hear at any given time. So, I wrote a program for my Atari 1200XL computer that randomly selected what I should play. Any time I had trouble deciding, it was time to fire up the computer and run the program. Oh cool, it’s Martin Briley today! Or Iron Maiden. Or the Alan Parsons Project. Sometimes I'd trade cassettes for a night or two with my friend Terry.
Most of my collection came from the BMG Music Club. If you signed up to buy something like three overpriced tapes over three years — probably five dollars more per tape than what you could get them for in a store — you could get a dozen free ones up front and then a few more freebies (usually two or four) after you bought the ones you were contracted to buy. I would sign up, buy the ones I had to, get my free ones for completing the agreement, then cancel and start all over again.
I went off to college in Columbus in the fall of 1985 and it wasn’t long before my musical landscape changed. My roommate Corky had an amazing stereo system and a love of music equal to or greater than my own. We had some common ground — we were both fans of Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood and The Alan Parsons Project. But he also had Pink Floyd albums beyond the few titles I owned. I heard Animals for the first time. He had an enormous collection of singles too.
I switched from cassettes to the new compact disc format — I believe at Christmas of 1986. Again, my first CD player was a gift from my parents and, again, my awesome parents supplied my first two offerings in that format as gifts. This time I got Then & Now…The Best of the Monkees and Slippery When Wet by Bon Jovi. Very different styles.
I loved the CD format. You couldn’t wear them out like cassettes and unless you scratched them they never skipped. The sound was pristine. Although I know a lot of people who have gone back to vinyl, I’ve never even been tempted. I grew up in a town with one record store and one department store that sold records and it seemed like at least two thirds of the records I bought had skips in them and when I’d return them I’d often have to wait for the store to order a copy for me because it was sold out. With CDs, those days were gone. You could occasionally get a damaged one because the teeth broke out of the jewel case and scratched it up or it was simply defective, but now that I was in the big city, I could exchange them easily.
I explored lots of genres in college. I spent some time listening to nothing but classics on Magic 99.7 FM, falling in love with the Grass Roots, the Guess Who, Bachman-Turner Overdrive, the Doors, and many others. It was the 80s, so of course I spent a lot of time listening to heavy metal. While delivering pizzas I sometimes listened to Sunny 95’s “Love Songs and Nothing but Love Songs” show in the evenings. I eventually discovered alternative rock and kept the dial glued to CD 101, where I discovered The Smiths, Shawn Colvin, Suzanne Vega, Barenaked Ladies, Cracker, Gin Blossoms, Toad the Wet Sprocket, and dozens of other great bands.
While working at the OSU newspaper, The Lantern, I got to do some music reviews. The first was for a cover band called Harvest, who did mainly Pink Floyd covers but also some other classics like Grand Funk Railroad’s “I’m Your Captain/Closer to Home.” I would go see Oswald and the Herringbones locally just about any night they played. Our arts editor, Neal Havener, was in the band, which had been in the first ever Mtv Basement Tapes competition. OATH shows were a blast and at some point they’d indulge the newspaper staff by playing a song called "The Newswriter’s Blues." Neal would start the song off and then some of us would get up and improvise a spontaneous verse over a standard blues riff. I would be grateful if someone could assure me that no footage exists of me singing live in front of actual humans, but I did participate on more than one occasion. I am a harsh judge of my own singing but I can think of a rhyme pretty quickly when I need to.
Music in college got me through some extremely difficult times. I have never been formally diagnosed but I’m quite sure I suffered from depression during my college years. Money was always tight and I couldn’t always afford to attend classes, so I fell behind my peers, who went on to graduate in the normal four years while I languished behind. I was stubbornly against taking out a student loan and starting my post-college years with thousands of dollars in debt, which, ironically, I ended up doing in the end anyway.
I began to suffer severe outbreaks of psoriasis coverage on my scalp and skin that made me miserable, particularly in the winter months. I was embarrassed by it but nothing much seemed to clear it aside from paying for tanning sessions, but, as I said, money was tight. My roommates and I would occasionally bounce checks on purpose just to buy groceries and then pay the grocery store back on payday. Between the money situation, my skin turning traitor on me, and the usual stress of becoming an adult (working multiple jobs, taking classes when I could, and trying to meet women), I felt down a lot. If I’m being honest I was probably also a functioning alcoholic. Nowadays I can enjoy one or two beers and be just fine with it, but in those days if I had one, I would continue until I either passed out or ran out of beer and/or money, and I did that pretty much every Thursday night through Sunday night.
I would sit in my room and listen to songs and the darker or sadder, the better. Despite the depression, I never contemplated ending things and I attribute that to being able to listen to such music. Someone always seemed to have it worse than I did. Some of those songs spoke to me on a deep level and at the very least they reminded me that I wasn’t alone in what I was going through. As Elton John sang:
If someone else is suffering enough oh to write it down
When every single word makes sense
Then it's easier to have those songs around
The kick inside is in the line that finally gets to you
And it feels so good to hurt so bad
And suffer just enough to sing the blues
Eventually, I graduated from college in June of 1996, getting through that last year at Ohio State by — yep — taking out a student loan. Something just clicked one day and I felt like if I didn’t graduate soon I’d end up just fading out. I was wasting away, spending my time in AOL chat rooms playing Movie Quote Trivia with total strangers — some of whom became friends.
During those last years in school I made some great friends when a minor league hockey team came to town. Working at Columbus Chill games and writing stories for their game programs brought me somewhat back to life. During those years I listened to the only rap songs I ever really got into, if only for a short time. My friends were so into the Beastie Boys that I went along with it and some of those were fun songs. I occasionally give them a listen now and, nope. I’m over that phase. I'm really not a rap guy.
Once the Chill arrived, I had a purpose. I wanted to go into hockey, so I did.
I got a job in Amarillo, Texas and moved far away from everyone and everything I loved. Working a hundred hours a week for a minor league hockey team was my joy in life and kept me from thinking (and drinking) more than I should. I didn’t discover much new music during my time in Texas. I was far too busy. The hockey team barely paid a wage, so I was working side hustles. I started doing a racing column for the newspaper in town and I started my own auto racing report that I sold at the various race tracks around town. After games or on weekend nights off I was still drinking way too much and spending a lot of time on AOL. A lot of the players frequented a country bar in Amarillo called the Midnight Rodeo and I hated the music, so I would typically stay home. The exception was once when 38 Special played there. I had to see that.
From Texas I moved to Albany, New York, and then down to South Florida, as my hockey career was on the rise. Working in hockey had some advantages because I could get tickets to see concerts in the arenas where my teams played and sometimes even get them for free. My sister came to see me in Albany and we went to a Billy Joel concert together. While with the Panthers, I got to see the Bee Gees’ millennial concert, Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, AC/DC, Elton John & Billy Joel, ZZ Top, and others. A friend from my Columbus Chill days was working at a small venue nearby and she’d make sure I got a good seat whenever I bought a ticket to a show, so I got fantastic seats (first few rows in the middle) in a great little venue for the Pretenders, the Go-Go’s, Rick Springfield, Elvis Costello, and Weird Al Yankovic. A colleague even got me backstage to meet the Go-Go’s, as his wife was a friend of Kathy Valentine (or maybe Gina Shock or Charlotte Caffey...I can't exactly recall but I know it wasn't Belinda Carlisle or Jane Wiedlin).
Shortly after I arrived in Florida, the Napster craze hit. I had been out of the loop, musically, but I had bought some new CDs here and there whenever something caught my attention. Now, suddenly here was all the music in the world available for free. All I had to do was download it. I knew that it wasn’t right to just take someone’s music for free but this was an opportunity. I downloaded and listened to albums I’d never really explored but had always meant to. I grabbed every Led Zeppelin album and all of the older Genesis stuff that came out before Peter Gabriel left the band. I burned it onto CDs and explored it. I listened to Yes. I loved it! I started buying up all those albums on CD. If not for Napster, I’d have spent a lot less money on music, which seems counterintuitive when you consider it was a service designed to essentially rip off artists’ work.
I became a huge fan of progressive rock and started listening to internet radio stations. An online friend sent me a Dream Theater CD for my birthday. A new door opened. I started grabbing up CDs from the bands I heard on stations like Delicious Agony and The Dividing Line — Spock’s Beard, Marillion, Enchant, IZZ, Magenta, Mostly Autumn, Porcupine Tree, Pendragon, the Flower Kings, and many more. I joined message boards to learn more and became a part of the Genesis and Spock’s Beard communities.
It was around this time that the hundreds of hours I spent online finally amounted to something and I married a wonderful woman who I’d met through AOL. I made a deal with Jamie that she could have her pick of basically anything in the wedding as long as I got a big say in the music. I burned a CD with stuff I wanted the DJ to play and demanded we hear no “Macarena” that night. The Panthers eliminated my position a month before the wedding, so we didn’t have a big honeymoon, but Jamie and I did fly to California for the first ever CalProg festival to see Neal Morse, Enchant, IZZ, and others. I got the tickets free and my friend Joel and his girlfriend let us stay in their hotel room so we only had to pay for the flight. It was my kind of honeymoon but I do feel bad I couldn’t afford to give Jamie the one she deserved. (But, I think she had fun.)
I even started my own radio show, which I broadcast for more than 10 years. I started at The Dividing Line and eventually moved it over to ProgRock.com. I met great people from all over the world who liked the same music I did. I even had some of the artists who made that music visit our chat room during my show on several occasions.
I found more outstanding artists from all over the world: Magic Pie, Riverside, Moon Safari, Sylvan, and so on. I met the guys from Little Atlas, who were just 40 minutes or so down the road in Miami and went to some of their local shows. I’d go up to West Palm Beach to see Rush or Peter Gabriel, sometimes with friends I’d met through my radio show. I started going to progressive rock festivals annually. The depression days were gone.
It was during the time I spent playing music for four hours every Friday night for my radio show that I found myself getting misty eyed when some songs played. A delicate guitar part or the right piano chord would set it off. I started to feel the beauty of the music more deeply. Sometimes it was just the right lyrics that could set it off.
We moved to Orlando in 2004 when I finally gave up on getting back into sports and just looked for work of any type. Two years later we moved into our first home. It was a brand new townhouse with no previous owners and we closed and moved in during December of 2006. We were excited that my mom was going to come down and visit us shortly after Christmas.
Sadly, that never happened.
Mom passed away after being in a traffic accident just a couple weeks before she was supposed to visit. I didn’t deal with it very well. My siblings needed me and I needed to not think about what had happened. I didn’t realize how badly they wanted me to come home and so of course I screwed that up by spending too much time getting my big important work responsibilities in order for my trip back to Ohio for the funeral. I should have just dropped everything and hurried home at top speed. I didn’t. I can’t take that back now but I’m pretty sure I was just in shock for a good week or two afterwards. Mom had always been there for me. Now she wasn't.
In 2007 we went up to Pennsylvania to scatter Mom’s ashes in the lake near her house. I felt compelled to pick out a song to play out on the water and nothing spoke to me about it like Marillion’s “Estonia.”
No one leaves you
When you live in their heart and mind
And no one dies
They just move to the other side
When we're gone
Watch the world simply carry on
We live on laughing and in no pain
We'll stay and be happy
With those who loved us today
I cannot sing this song anymore without my voice cracking, the tears coming, and me having to do all I can not to break down. It’s not a sad feeling though. I’m glad I chose that song to play out on the lake that day. It just has so much more meaning now for me than it did before and I think of Mom fondly when I hear it and the tears are actually happy.
My uncle also wrote and recorded a song for the ceremony and it was beautiful. Of course I had to have a copy of it. He’s an extremely talented musician and I’m sure I never let him know what a musical hero he was of mine. I had a cassette of some songs by AM/FM, a band he was in during his younger days, and I played it often and made a copy or two of it for my friends who liked it.
In 2008, after a series of devastating miscarriages, my wife gave birth to our beautiful daughter. She came early — in fact, very close to the second anniversary of my mother’s death — and we named her Kayleigh, after the Marillion song of the same name. As much as I loved the song, I also loved the name and that spelling of it in particular. Had she been a boy, we were discussing Collin (two Ls) after Phil Collins, another artist whose music — both as a solo performer and with Genesis — had resonated with me over the years.
“Kayleigh” itself is a song that I adored. The repeated use of “Do you remember?” and the melancholy and the ache of contrition and regret in it are all wonderfully present. The desire to go back to a happier time is something I strongly related to whenever I listened to it in my college years. Now that it has another personal meaning for me, it usually brings tears to my eyes.
I stopped doing my radio show in 2014. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy it anymore, but I’d been sacrificing pretty much every Friday night of my life for a decade to broadcast it live. I also found that I couldn’t keep up with all the new releases that were coming out. The availability of music from all over the world via the internet meant there was so much to go through and I simply didn’t have the time. I was getting contacted by new bands from around the world every week, asking me to give them a listen and perhaps play them on the show if I liked what I heard. It was a bit overwhelming.
I could have just kept playing the same songs, albums, and artists over and over, but that didn’t interest me as much and I felt I couldn’t do the show the way I wanted to anymore if I couldn’t keep up with all the newest songs. I sometimes miss it and have been asked to pick it up again many times, but I’ve filled much of my free time with new activities that would suffer if I did — not to mention, I’d have an even bigger problem trying to parse through all the stuff I’ve missed in the last five years, let alone trying to keep up with all the new releases.
These days I don’t get to listen to as much music as I’d like (who has the time?!). I do have a Spotify premium subscription and have found a lot of new songs and artists that way. It also helps me keep up with the artists I already know and love. I still buy CDs, although I’m also more open to buying music digitally because storing my vast collection has become difficult. Thousands of CDs take up quite a bit of space! As much as I love having the physical media, at some point it becomes unwieldy. It also creates other issues because my new car doesn’t have a CD player, so I have to transfer stuff onto my phone or onto flash drives. My, how technology has changed since I was playing 8-tracks and hating it whenever the track change came in the middle of a song.
This all brings me back around to the beginning, oh so many paragraphs ago.
So, I’m watching the Spock’s Beard Snow Live reunion DVD and I noticed this same salty discharge that baffled Jerry Seinfeld in the episode referenced above. It was in my eyes, blurring my vision, and trickling down my face. What the hell?
Neal Morse, the founder of Spock’s Beard, has created so much incredible music that it would literally take several days of listening to it continuously to go from the start of his career to the present. He’s also a member of progressive rock supergroup Transatlantic, as well as a more modern-sounding prog band, Flying Colors.
As an artist, Neal has perhaps touched a nerve in me the most over the last two decades. His melodies are beautiful and he has a gift for weaving together recurring themes and disparate parts into coherent songs that make use of counterpoint, inversions of chord progressions, and other fancy things I will never be able to create. (My awesome wife did buy me a guitar for Christmas one year and after several starts and stops I can bang out a few basic chords but I still can’t play an entire song all the way through.)
Neal built Spock’s Beard with a group of tremendously talented musicians, including his brother Alan, and before he left the band they put together six amazing albums, culminating in the double concept album, Snow. During his time building the band, Neal was also building a personal relationship with God. While recording Snow he felt he had to leave the band to take a more personal path in his music that followed his faith and he didn’t want to force that on his bandmates, so he decided to leave the group after the album was finished.
I had only discovered the band around the time that the album was being released so it was a bit devastating to me to see the creative force leaving, just as I had found these six wonderful records (I still think of them as records, even though I own none of them on vinyl). I have been able to enjoy Neal’s more spiritually themed solo releases, although many SB fans could not. I have my own faith and don’t subscribe to Neal’s particular brand of Christianity, but there’s a lot that still speaks to me in his music.
Watching the Snow Live DVD, an album I’d always enjoyed really clicked for me in a way that it never had before and I built a whole new appreciation for it. Seeing the band reunited — not only with Neal, but with drummer Nick D’Virgilio, who had spent some time as the front man in a Phil Collins-esque turn before departing as well; and other new members who had joined since Neal’s departure — really brought the album home for me in a new way. All of its beauty and messages flooded into me and I found myself crying. Tears of joy. They surprise me every time.
I started to think about how often in recent years I’ve found myself welling up at the sheer beauty of a song; how often my voice has cracked with emotion while trying to sing along to a song in the car. I shook my head, trying to think of when this all started and why it might be that music is hitting me in a much deeper emotional place than ever before. I decided to start writing to get to the bottom of this mystery.
After these thousands of words, I still don’t know what’s caused it or why it’s happening. I know why Neal often cries during concerts. He has such a deep connection with the source material, after all — from his Testimony album, which follows his spiritual awakening, to the song “Jayda” (from Testimony 2), which tells the story of how his daughter was born in critical condition with a hole in her heart that closed on its own, miraculously.
He wept near the end of Snow Live, after I’d already shed several tears throughout the show. While I was moved by the beauty of the songs, the reunion itself, and finally getting to see this masterpiece performed live, Neal was reliving his earlier realization that he would be leaving Spock’s Beard (“I Will Go”) and possibly the idea that this reunion show was nearly over. That just made me cry even more.
It doesn’t bother me that music can make me cry, and I’m not ashamed of it. It’s also crossed over into movies. Even when I realize the soundtrack is trying to pull at me emotionally, I still often succumb. I may never know why this change has occurred, whether it’s just age, maturity, some deeper understanding or connection, or whatever. In the end, it doesn’t matter, I guess. I’ll own it. I just wish I could still sing along with a song like Pink Floyd's "High Hopes" without getting choked up.
Hey, thanks for making it this far. If I had a gold star for you, I’d give it to you now.