Thoughts on Sadness

I've been listening to Infra by Max Richter recently (tonight). You only get out of music what you put in I think. Or not that, more that you only feel what you have in you already. Music isn't a shortcut to emotional depth. Music is a frame, a kindling to flickering embers of memory and memory of emotion. I think every memory can have the opposite emotional effect. Memories of happy times become melancholic reminders of good times past, and the sad, reminders of the good you have now. But if you write sadness off as something to fear, or to avoid, you miss the truth in it, and you look back only with regret.

Your highs are relative to your lows, constantly seek highs and you stop feeling them, only the difference, the jump up between them excites you, and each leap becomes smaller, less exciting, less fulfilling. By exploring sadness in life, in music, in film, in works of art and in books does the middle ground, the mundane become a truthful, achievable high. Failing to understand the true meaning of sadness I think means not understanding the power and strength that comes from not hiding from the horrors of world, but embracing them.

This music is a cathartic, beautiful, melancholic celebration of the depth and sorrow of being human. I love frivolous indie pop as much as the next man, or maybe the next man along from the next man, but it would mean nothing to me without sadness, without the shade and the darkness. I'd be smiling, but I wouldn't know why.

Now where are my ELO albums...

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