How Music Works

Throughout the history of recorded music, we have tended to value convenience over quality every time. Edison cylinders didn’t really sound as good as live performers, but you could carry them around and play them whenever you wanted. LPs, revolving slower, didn’t sound as rich as 45s or 78s, but you didn’t have to attend to them as much. And cassettes? Are you kidding? We were told that CDs would last forever and sound squeaky clean, but they really don’t sound as good as LPs, and the jury is out regarding their durability. The spectrum of sound on analog mediums has an infinite number of gradations, whereas in the digital world everything is sliced

When I later heard about bands actually paying to play in certain clubs, I knew things had been perverted in a terrible way. The desperate, innate desire to create and perform had been exploited rather than supported.

We carry our own soundtrack with us wherever we go, and the world around us is overlaid with our music. Our whole life becomes a movie, and we can alter the score for it over and over again: one minute it’s a tragedy and the next it’s an action film. Energetic, dreamy, or ominous and dark: everyone has their own private movie going on in their heads, and no two are the same.