WHAT????!!!
All right, so it’s one thing for a kid to have an amazing level of mechanical skill, but Billie Tweddle is the absolute definition of genius in my mind. She is yet another singer-songwriter, singing about heartbreak and what have you, and she does it really, really well. I mean, this is real poetry, folks – some of the best use of language I’ve ever heard, I think. Seriously. There is some kind of twisted level of depth achieved by this here girl, and on top of it, her voice is friggin’ polished, as is her ability to express herself through her performance in general. And she’s twelve. She’s TWELVE, for God’s sake! Aaaaarggghhh!!!!!! Shoot me right now in the face! Aaaarrrrggghhh!!!!! Seriously, you should watch this.
You see what I mean? You see? I give up. I quit. Okay, not really. I think instead I’ll just drink heavily for several days to get my bearings and be on my way. You take care of yourself, too. Bye now!
God
Yo. I wanted to share this video because of the strangely profound effect it has on me. For me, this video represents some kind of eerie depth of reality that inspires in me a weird combination of feelings. There is a feeling of strangeness – I feel slightly uncomfortable, but in a good way – mixed with some sort of simmering excitement and and at the same time, peaceful warmth – like I feel whole and complete.
I think this response has something to do with the series of spiritual experiences I had about ten years ago. I also did a lot of reading back then. One of my favorite authors at the time was Lewis Thomas, a guy who wrote a whole bunch of essays in the seventies on the topic of biology. He wrote one essay entitled “The Music of This Sphere,” in which he celebrates the sounds life on Earth makes, observing that more than anything else, creatures love to make noise. From here, he draws an analogy to music, suggesting that if we could hear all the sounds life’s creatures make all at once, it would sound like the most incredible musical composition we’ve ever heard. After first reading this a decade ago, I was standing outside the woods one summer midnight while hanging out with some friends, and I was just listening to the noise of the insects emanating from the mysterious blackness of the forest, imagining a great symphony, with each species as a different instrumental section. The experience was really something.
I was high at the time, of course.
You see, music is really magical for me. I’ve thought about this a number of times. There’s something really unique about music. I mean, there’s more to it than just “really cool sounds.” The experience of listening to the sound effects in Star Wars is very different from the experience of listening to a really good piece of music, even if there are no lyrics. We feel “moved” by music. What the hell is that? I mean, neuroscientists tell us that our brains are wired from birth to appreciate music, and even more fascinating is the fact that the most ear-pleasing pairs of frequencies happen to be perfect mathematical fractions of one another. Music is it’s own animal in the human experience. There’s nothing else like it. Because of this, music is a surefire way for me to tap into spiritual feelings.
Now, I know that most bird formations will probably not sound pretty when translated into musical notation, and I know that if we actually heard the biosphere’s collective noise, it would probably just sound like static, and I know experiences influenced by The Sweet Leaf should probably be taken with a grain of salt. Scientific skeptics will surely explain away all of my feelings whilst rolling their eyes, but I’m not so naive that I haven’t already considered such explanations, and quite frankly, as atheistic as some of my song lyrics may seem, scientific skepticism is one of my great pet peeves. I don’t see any value in what seems to me to be a dogged effort to strip magic from a reality which is full of magical things, magical things which we’ve renamed with “proper” words, like “electromagnetic energy” and “sinusoidal plane wave frequencies.”
I don’t know about anyone else, but when I see music, math, and nature line up like they do in this video, I get the staggering feeling that I’m witnessing a glimpse of reality in its totality, rather than in little bits and fragments like we usually experience. And that centralized, holistic, and fundamental truth of all reality is how I personally define God, in contrast with the bearded old man in the clouds.
So, yeah, it’s God on YouTube, I guess.
Also, there’s this:
Try to imagine a wedding that this band wouldn’t ruin. If you can, you have a better imagination than I. 2:07 to 2:24 is my favorite.
Alayna Powley
Hey, here’s a really good song from upcoming New Zealand singer-songwriter Alayna Powley. It’s called “Seeking Happiness.” Check it out! Oh, and you can find the lyrics here.
Pretty neat, eh? Yes, I thought so, too. Oh, and sorry for my extra-lame internet presence as of late. I think I’ll be able to put up another YouTube video this week, and in about a month’s time I’ll be in super active mode with a super-radical recording space which I’ll probably show you in a video or something. Ooh, look! A good weekend! Have it!
The Sleepy Man Banjo Boys
All right, remember that really great bluegrass band I posted about a few weeks ago, The Henhouse Prowlers? Well, these guys are even better. And they’re, like, 10 years old. Jesus Humphrey Christ. I watched this video two or three times, racking my brain to try to figure out whether or not these kid’s heads were somehow photoshopped onto some adult’s torso, only to see another performance of theirs on Letterman. You may have seen this because it was a big YouTube hit a year ago, but in case you haven’t, I thought I’d share. Watching it was a pretty surreal experience for me, like some sort of eerie, twisted dream. Why do people like this exist? Are they trying to make me look pathetic? I mean, when I play the guitar, there is a persistent, lingering fear that every single one of my plucks will miss the strings entirely, my awkward, contorted fingers trembling and aching from the crippling effort of producing simple chords. Where do these…these…infants get the gall to embarrass me like this? I think they need to be thrown in prison. Enjoy.
mattglaz.com 