When do you most often listen to music?
“Probably most often in the car, with the windows down and the sound way way up.”
How often do you find yourself listening to music and where?
“I listen to music all the time. I’m a creative person and I feel that music affects my mood, can act as my muse, can help me sleep, can wake me up. I listen to music everywhere, in my house, in my car, walking down the street, in the shower, sometimes simultaneously while I’m watching TV.”
What piece of technology do you most often use to access music?
“I use my phone more often than not, (Samsung 4). I even use my phone when I’m in the car because then I can access the playlists I’ve made. I almost never listen to the radio, I find most music played on the radio is uninspired, and just wack I can only be called a bitch so many times or hear about my ass or her ass so many times or here completely blatant euphemisms for sex over and over again, I need my music to be a little more clever than that.”
What is your favorite source of music to listen to (Spotify, Pandora, ITunes) and why?
“I use Google Music Play, prefer it to iTunes cause I can download as much music as I want for $8 a month and because iTunes kept giving me problems with downloads and accessing my library thru other devices.”
Do you listen to different music by yourself vs. if you were in a group, or live?
“My music tastes are very very varied so what I listen to doesn’t really change based on where I am or who I’m with. Though I do tend to like music with bands (vs. DJ or tracks) more live, I like the live sound of real instruments and the vibe that you can get from a band performing, they’re free to sort of mix things up and you never know what might happen.”
Do you prefer to listen alone, group, or live performance and why?
“If I’m trying to write or sort of spur creative juices I prefer to listen alone, for everything else I love being in a group, people can dance or share music you may have never heard and then you find new things to love. Live performances are my favorite I just love the vibe of watching a band perform, hearing new versions of familiar songs and just feeling like a part of the music.”
Do you find that a particular form of listening is more authentic than one another?
“That’s an interesting question, I think live music is more authentic, if there can be such a thing. Only because for most live shows I’ve seen, the artist is relaxed and comfortably in their element and it’s just them and the music and you get it at it’s rawest truest form. There’s no mixing or producing to create this ‘perfect’ final product. You get what is in their heart and spirit at that time, what they’re going thru, how they’re feeling comes out in how they sound, how they relate to the audience, how they interpret and deliver lyrics they’ve probably performed hundreds of times before. In that moment it can feel intimate and special in a way that downloaded or recorded music can’t really replicate.”
What does music mean to you?
“Music and words inhabit they same place for me, I have lived my life by them; words are what I do, they are my outlet, how I make a living, what I hope to be my career; music is (to borrow from what I said earlier) my heartbeat for that. Music is such an enlightened thing, it is universal, you can hear songs in a language you don’t understand and still intuit what is being said just from how the song is put together, the inflection, the tempo, the base. Khalil Gibran, one of my favorite poets, said ‘music is the language of the spirit’. I think that sums it up perfectly.”
-as told to Alexandria