On Good Music

Good music is hard to find because it must meet at least two criteria -  it has to have a catchy tune and the lyrics have to mean something.  Whenever I listen to music and it has a catchy tune, I try to look up the lyrics later to see if it matches the tune.  If it does, I usually memorize the lyrics and listen to the music enough that I can sing along whenever I please.

Amazingly enough, really good music does not even really depend upon how well the author can sing.  Some people, if you just heard them singing, you may find their voices annoying and not listen to them.  But if they are singing a really great song, you don't even notice how obnoxious they are. This often happens in church.  Not many truly care about what the leader may sound like, all they care about is worship.

Some music, like heavy metal, my brothers love.  I may enjoy the lyrics if I could understand them enough to look it up.  Or I can appreciate the talent in the musicians in the band because even I can hear the difficulty in what they play.  My brothers may tell me numerous times that it is, in fact, good music and they enjoy it immensely but I need the lyrics.  I need to understand what they say and I can't so I often don't agree personally.  Maybe in a version that I don't need to learn "the language" or learn how "to interpret" it, I would agree that it is indeed good but in its present form, I would argue with them in my taste.

Some songs that you listen to, you can listen to a thousand times and find more meaning for your every day life.  The best of songs are the ones that are timeless.  They may be super old, but even people who were born after the song was written can enjoy.  For musicals and plays, we would often sing songs before it started while we were warming up.  The one year, we had the entire cast singing Don't Stop Believing before the play began.  Our director just stared us in utter confusion, since that was the first time that he directed us.

Good music can be sung for years and not grow old or irrelevant.  Truly great songs will be sung until the end of times and still have people jumping around and singing it to each other.  They are the songs that you can dance around with and sing with your children and watch your grandchildren do the same.  They are the ones that people can do thousands of re-dos of where sometimes they may turn out to be better than the original but more often you will always look back to the original.