I love music.
It’s not just your normal, run-of-the-mill, love of music either.
I recently took a trip to Las Vegas, Nevada where I went to an exhibit of the human body. It was quite amazing and there I learned, much to my own amusement, that we are born with an innate preference to either salty or sweet. For my own life, I’d like to think that’s how it is with people and what we like, dislike, love, or hate. That when whatever up in the sky made me (I’m not one for scripture, but more on that later) it gave me the special ability to feel the music that another person creates.
Of course, there are plenty of people who will think I’m completely out of it for thinking this, but the people who are close to me would agree, I am a different music fan. I rarely am obsessive about members of bands, I do not shy away from different genres, and most of all I can appreciate all forms of music, from Bluegrass to Heavy Metal, it all has it’s merit…and it all has an important person.
Have you ever met anyone who hated music? Didn’t have a favorite band? A favorite song? A favorite genre, style, musician? Well I know I haven’t and this is my point of this project. We all are built into our own worlds, a small soda straw in which we look out into the world but with the help of music people who are in wars with each other, countries torn apart by economic stress, families torn apart, and gluttonous Americans can have a common ground in which we can relate. We all have experiences that others have had, we can understand the pain of suicide, of death, of heartbreak, of joy, of imagining all the people living in peace. That is what this project is about. Bringing human beings together through musical experience.
Which brings me to myself.
My name is Maura Wery. I am not an exciting person, I go to college, I work at a local Applebee’s, I will probably only make a maximum of 40,000 dollars in my entire career, I am nothing to write home about.
But I have a gift, a gift of feeling.
I remember the first time I listened to a mainstream radio station. I live in the small town of Junction City, Kansas, a population of barely 22,000 people. We had 4 radio stations. One rock, one easily listening, one country, and one top 40 station, I was eight years old, cleaning my room with a large boom-box with a cassette player and a CD player. Which at the time probably cost my parents a good 100 dollars for my “big” Christmas present. I had grown up on Country music, my family had come from the sticks of Tennessee and Texas so regardless of what I liked the set stations of vehicles and stereos other than my own were fixed on the one whole country station. Not that I hate country music, I just wanted to branch out, it was something my 8 year old self didn’t know at the time, but it would change my entire life. I turned it to the top 40 station after hearing a song I couldn’t stand and the very first song to hit my ears was Oasis’s “Wonderwall”.
To this day, if that song comes on the radio, television, iPod, music making machine, it is one of the most beautiful and simple songs that I have ever heard.
“I said maybe, You’re gonna be the one who saves me ? And after all, You’re my wonderwall”
A love song with a loving back-beat and melody, simple lyrics that get the point along. I often credit it with causing my love affair with music because in a sense I fell in love with the song, therefore I went out looking for anything like it.
That is the power of music my friends and what a power it is.
Stay tuned.
M.W.
