A Song Is Not Just A Song

A song comes from an emotional place before it is composed. The hand writes what the heart feels. The melody flows through your veins and comes out of your instrument of choice.

A song is percieved through sound and rhythmic vibrations. It is heard through the ears and most times the rhythm is felt throughout your body. What makes a song good or bad is how the mind body connection resonates with the music and words.

Songs can make you feel good or bad. They can trigger memories of people, places and events in the near and distant past. Songs are not just frivolous past times, they are an itrigal part of people's lives. Songs are able to help people having trouble relating to the world around them. All people respond to songs  in various ways such as smiling, swaying, singing, clapping their hands, tapping their feet, or playing an instrument.

A song not only reflects the life of the creator but also the culture in which they live. The songs that resonate the strongest with me are songs from the sixties and seventies. Those were the decades I attended school. They were my formative years when I was the most impressionable. There wasn't a year that went by that I didn't sing a solo or sing in a chorus. We sang sacred and secular songs.

I danced to popular music at school functions as well as listening to songs on the radio. Friends also influenced what I listened to. My favorite group was the Beatles. Out of their many songs my two favorites were, "Places", and, "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". Those songs are still my favorites due to the timelessness of their lyrics and their melodies. They are as relavent today as when they were written.

Sometimes a song is just a song if you don't somehow connect to it. I know my parents thought our songs were just a lot of noise and I think that about some of today's songs. I find many of them to be offensive due to the language. I guess every generation pushes the envelope creatively. To the younger generation our songs are just songs.

So is a song just a song? I guess it would depend on the age of the listener.