Wanting To Be Different

I have always been amazed and impressed by people who compose music – the words chosen, their own cadence, the melody and harmony carefully laid into the cadence of the words – or perhaps the melody and harmony developed and the words crafted into that structure. It has always fascinated me. I used to do a little songwriting of my own, back in the day when I was an angst-ridden teen and twenty-something, but very little of it has any critical value in either the poetry or melody areas. At least that was my thinking when, in October and November of 2009, I gave all those old handwritten lyrics one last look before shredding them for recycling. There was just no room in our new home for all those boxes of sentiment that I could hardly ever bear to look at anyway. Those plus all my many journals of personal thoughts over the years gave me buckets of tears as I said goodbye to my old life in Missouri and prepared for the whole new life awaiting me in Florida.

Some of my favorite music of all time, though, is music composed by my younger step-son. Knowing Josh the way I do, the lyrics take me inside his head and help me understand what’s really going on with him. I often cry, but I can always relate. He is a great talent and I hope he will be able to achieve some level of financial success with his chosen career of sound engineering or some such thing – closely related to music, of course. His ability to craft words and melody, harmony and counter-melody is already a success in my mind (whether or not the public at large would agree, and I have no way of knowing that). These are beautiful and yet disturbing songs that haunt your brain and move your heart.

Yesterday while I was at the library, after checking out the latest Ruth Rendell novel in large print (double treat!), I browsed through the music CDs and right in front was Maroon 5’s “Songs About Jane”. This CD was apparently released in 2003 (according to the tiny print on the disc itself and my trusty magnifying glass) but it’s still a real landmark piece of music, at least in my mind. I remember sometime around that time, maybe 2004, attending the wedding of a friend’s daughter and sitting with a friend, Bonnie, who had been a member of St. Louis Harmony Chorus with the bride’s mother Diane and me. I believe the DJ played “This Love” along with other songs of that era, including “Let’s Get It Started” and some other very youthful party songs. As we sat there, a bunch of “old people” sipping champagne and nibbling hors d’oevres, Bonnie told me she had the Maroon 5 CD and she listened to it over and over. I thought at the time, she knows her stuff and maybe I should check that one out, but never quite got around to it. Perhaps June of 2011 isn’t too late, so yesterday I did quite literally “check it out”.

This is a great CD in so many ways. In watching “The Voice”, the new reality show and singing competition, I feel like I have gotten to know Adam Levine, lead singer of Maroon 5. He is an interesting character and obviously very knowledgeable about music in addition to being a great singer and performer in his own right. His high-register singing voice has such a unique tonal quality that it comes close, in my opinion, to being an audio trademark – it is instantly recognizable and beautiful. And yet, while coaching on “The Voice”, Adam has commented to more than one of the male contestants about their nice deep singing voices or some such thing, in a way that bordered on wistful. That got me thinking. A man with a beautiful, iconic voice wishes he had a more “manly” deep voice? Why would he change anything?

In listening to the lyrics on this CD, even before digging out the magnifying glass yet again to read the liner notes regarding who composed the songs, I recognized a very familiar character in the emotional terrain of these compositions: the shy, self-doubting, intelligent and sensitive nerd. Usually thin, rarely successful with “the ladies”, and always wishing to be someone else.

For the last two years of my college days, I attended an engineering school where men outnumbered women 4 to 1 (I believe it had been 10 to 1 two years prior). I was one of those young ladies who was very attractive, maybe even considered pretty by some, but just didn’t realize it. My self esteem was so very low that I was always willing (at least initially) to accept whatever male attention happened to come my way. After getting to know some of these guys, I would change my mind and try to disengage, but a select few of them would follow me wistfully around campus in a sort of hero worship thereafter. Nowadays we call that “stalking”, but at the time, it seemed harmless if somewhat annoying. I eventually had quite the collection of those wonderful nerdy guys who were hopelessly in love with me and whom I had rejected after the initial attraction, whose self esteem was as bad as my own but whose obsession sent me running the other direction.

If you think about it, how many songs, and for that matter, how many people, spend their lives wanting to be something or someone else? The man with the beautiful, iconic voice wants to sound more “manly” – really? The young intelligent lady with the self-dyed carrot red hair, blue eyes, body out of a Vargas artwork and amazing radio voice wants to be a thin, tan girl with clear skin and straight hair – again, really? The same lady, now truly heavy and middle-aged, wonders what the heck she was thinking. But now she is married to a man who truly loves her with all his heart, a very talented, sensitive, intelligent, beautifully-tanned and handsome man who wishes he were 6 inches taller and had his hair back. Really? Once again, it’s a shame we can’t all see ourselves, just for a moment, the way someone else who loves us sees us, and treasure the value that is already there, instead of wanting to be different.