We can define love as "a profound and caring affection", which is to say that love is different than 'like', which is a surface-level enjoyment that also has its place. Love is something special, something deeper, something that cannot be given to everyone without being cheapened beyond recognition.
One of my core beliefs is that we all have a finite amount of love we are capable of. That amount will differ based on the nature of our souls, but it's impossible to truly love everyone or everything and mean it in each case. Love is reserved for the truly special, the ones we would feel incomplete without. Love is not for those things that flash in our vision, give us a quick smile, and then fade away like a wisp of a smoke-show burned up and burned out on a breezy day.
When it comes to music, love is easier to quantify. We can make lists of bands and albums we claim to love, and we can tally up the numbers in ways we aren't able to do with personal relationships. This is helpful to catalog our feelings and organize our thoughts, but it's also a cause for concern. If our number is not just lower than most, but dramatically so, it can raise questions about what is wrong with us and why we don't connect to as much of the human experience as others.
That is certainly my experience with all of this. Every December, I see people making lists of their fifty (or even one hundred) favorite albums of the year. I also see them sitting in front of their collections of thousands upon thousands of albums. I look at them and I truly cannot comprehend feeling strongly enough about that much music to talk glowingly about it, let alone own physical copies. Most years, I'm lucky to be able to cobble together a full top-ten list without starting to think the last entry or two aren't going to last in my memory long enough to deserve the attention.
Are these people merely musically promiscuous? Or do they have standards so low raising the bar would require digging it out of the dirt?
My observation is that few people have ever given much thought to the subject of love. When I was studying philosophy, what struck me most was the realization we were spending so much time and energy trying to rationalize and explain the way we think life should be that we missed the fact most people are merely reactive. To take ethics as an example, we might sit down and weigh out the pros and cons of a few major decisions we have to make in our lifetime, but the day-to-day sorting of right and wrong is done through instinct. The theory I developed for myself was one with a technical term, but essentially boiled down to the majority of our concept of 'morality' being a highbrow attempt to rationalize our emotions. Politics works this way now, doesn't it?
That is to say love is something people claim because they felt something in their chest for a moment, without checking to see if it was heartburn. When you see people you know jump from one relationship to another, leaving behind a string of exes so numerous they could fill up a rosary used to pray to the gods of love, perhaps they are overestimating the level of attachment they had to all of their paramours. I can see this, since I am an outsider.
With music, the same thing happens. I have had many conversations (ok, arguments) with certain people over their nauseating level of fawning for nearly everything. These are people who will rate nearly everything they hear at least an eight out of ten. They are people who praise everything to such a degree their voice becomes worthless. If you've never given any indication you have standards, why would anyone listen to anything you have to say?
So yes, I proclaim love for far less music than most people you could be listening to. I consider that a good thing, though, because it means when I praise something I truly mean it, and I have given it thought. Just because a record is moderately enjoyable for a few minutes is not enough, love only comes when it is able to etch itself in either my mind or my heart.
So what in music do I love?
My first love was the music of Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman, as I have noted countless times over the years. Whether they were working together or separately, they embodied a love of melodrama few musicians outside of the theater have ever been capable of. For someone young who lived in his own head, and who even then knew he would only be able to imagine the scenarios Steinman was writing about, turning up the dial of absurdity was necessary for me to be able to see it in my own vision. My imagination fails me these days, but they screamed so loud the echoes are still audible when I am otherwise drowning in silence.
My deepest love is for Dilana, as I have also noted countless times over the years. My formative years were spent vacillating between being told by family not to bother looking for love and hearing my name mentioned so infrequently I wasn't entirely sure I existed. It was not a joke when I questioned if I had emotions at all, as I did not understand what was going on in my own head the way I do today. Dilana changed that with a voice that echoed so deeply it showed me the depths of my soul. Her ability to pour pain and love into every song was so strong it broke through the walls I put up to protect myself. She is more than music to me, she is a dear friend who reminds me there is a sweet flesh underneath my bitter rind.
I can also attest to love for Lzzy Hale. She has been honest about going through a journey of self-discovery that is told through her music, and I have been attempting much the same for myself. There is the physiological response to her voice, the electricity that runs down my nerves when I hear her belting out a gritty note, but it goes beyond that. There is a psychological component in feeling connected to someone else struggling to figure out how they integrate into the world, someone who is secure enough to tell dirty jokes while being utterly insecure about themselves. There is a kinship there that lets me think the knots of my mental wiring can be untangled someday, because someone else with the same component parts has managed the feat.
I love VK Lynne for being a conscience, for daring me to think about the music I listen to, and for letting me feel like the world of music has not passed me by. She embodies the archetype of bleeding your soul into your art, using her words and melodies to peel back the layers of her psyche. As the current of my own inspiration has slowed to a trickle, digging into her stories has allowed me to continue exploring aspects of philosophy and psychology that reveal nuances of my thinking I was only subconsciously aware of. She challenges me, and while I may not always rise to meet it, having an artist that feeds into the gift of what music can be is essential to keep my vision from losing focus, from blurring so much I can no longer see the point.
Love might end with that short list. Ronnie James Dio is dearly important to me as a voice, and a manifestation of my darker side, but his penchant for swords and dragons storytelling is a foreign language to me. John Popper and Blues Traveler opened my eyes to the cynicism within me, and he has written several songs that help me to tell my story, but that feels more like how the two points of a diameter are on the same circle despite being as far from each other as possible. Jakob Dylan and The Wallflowers are cherished for giving me the gift of my own poetry, but we are clearly the products of different generations.
The other true love I have right now comes in the form of my favorite album of all time, "Futures" by Jimmy Eat World. If love is that indescribable physical reaction we have to someone or something that draws us to be with them, I have that with the album. There are pieces of my psyche that are either missing or damaged, and that record is the salve that fills in the gaps. Finding the light when the sky is darkest is something we can't always do, but "Futures" guides the way. You can't pull yourself up by the bootstraps, nor can you dig your way out of your own grave. You need help to seed the black clouds to drop rain that washes away your doubts and fears. That is what "Futures" does for me, and it's why I can say I love the record.
I don't know about you, but I don't have the energy to spread love like dandelion seeds on the wind. This is enough for me. I don't need to point to thousands of albums or hundreds of bands to prove myself to anyone. Love is about how these people and things make us feel. I can say I've given this deep and contemplative thought, and I mean everything I say.
How many others can say the same?
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