📝 Songs, Feelings and Space

In Fiona Hardy’s novel How to Write the Soundtrack to Your Life, the protagonist, Murphy, reflects on the association between songs and feelings.

As more songs played, I kept thinking about that. How songs made people feel different ways, like they were in different seasons. Like they were running, or sitting calmly, or at the beach; or the feeling they had when their dog had gone to the vet and not come back; or when they were at their grandma’s farm and it was night and so dark they could see everything and nothing. And the more they spoke, the more I knew I was desperate to play my keyboard. To make something like these things. To build a feeling.

Fiona Hardy https://affirmpress.com.au/publishing/how-to-write-the-soundtrack-to-your-life/

This had me thinking about the role of music in setting space. For example, the soundtrack to Sons of Anarchy draws on many familar tracks, but interprets them to fit a particular feel. Or David Lynch’s subversive choices, such as the use of Roy Orbison’s In Dreams in Blue Velvet.

To me, Lynch and Orbison both occupy a space in their respective art forms as singular voices. Each seem to traverse or explore more dream-like or subconscious terrain and each bring back a vision that is unique, that is, perhaps, candy colored.

Nicholas Rys https://entropymag.org/under-the-influence-3-roy-orbison-and-david-lynch/

Another way of looking at the creation of space, is the search for a space long lost. This is what Daniel Leviton unpacks in regards to the association between music and the memory of a particular time in life,