Lent Day 32: Where do you find joy? Part 1: Music

I've noticed something in this late-stage pandemic time we are in--not to mention, for those of us of the clergy persuasion, this late-stage Lenten moment as we approach Holy Week. 

We are all looking for joy. We are using phrases like "comfort food" (and not only when referring to, you know, food). We are asking one another how we are doing, and it has me wondering: Where do you find joy these days? I know my daughter and I are making playlists on our phones titled things like "The Joy of Spring" and "Roll Credits" (as in, the movie's over, and you LOVED IT). 

I think I'll talk about music today. How I Find Joy In Music.

I am a musical omnivore. You will find me listening, in the same day, to Toto, Etta James, the Indigo Girls, Ella Fitzgerald, David Bowie, the Bright Wings Chorus, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, and Emmanuel Ax. (This represents a true, actual day.)

Recently I've been listening to a playlist called "Winter Comfort Music," which consists mostly of music from the Ted Lasso soundtrack. (Ted Lasso is another day. He gets an entire blogpost to himself, because of the joy that show has brought me.)

So, in the space of an hour I'll be listening to Lizzo singing "Juice," Bowie and Mercury singing "Under Pressure," Dusty Springfield singing "Wishing and Hoping" (which I forever will associate with the opening credits of "My Best Friend's Wedding," another long-standing source of joy), and a completely new to me offering, "Harmony Hall" by Vampire Weekend, which is on repeat these days. (Try it, you'll like it, I promise.)

I may be a bit of a weirdo, but a song doesn't have to be a happy song to make me happy. Take Toto. This week I've listened to "Hold the Line" roughly 27 times. It's definitely about a difficult/ complicated/ failing relationship. But it doesn't matter, because the opening percussive piano triplets, and then the heavy-metal-sounding guitar licks are designed to release endorphins. (For me, at least. I don't make the rules.) Same with "Harmony Hall"--I can't quite make out what the song is about, but, again, that piano bop that precedes the chorus each time just makes me dance, wherever I am. (I just looked the song up on Wikipedia--they say that the lyrics cause feelings of dread. That may be! But they don't bother me!)

Recently I heard my colleague Chris play the daylights out of my very favorite classical piano piece ever, Brahms' Intermezzo, Opus 118, No. 2. I've known the piece since I was in college, and I hadn't listened to it in a few years. But the first few very dearly familiar notes instantly sent joy surging through me...and I will concede, it's a melancholy-bordering-on-heartbroken kind of sound. But its luscious harmonies, and the path it travels from beginning to end are mesmerizing and glorious, and it simply makes me happy.

Sometimes, though, the perfect mesh of music and lyrics does make a big, big difference. An odd entry in the "it makes me happy" category has to be "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy," Episcopal Hymnal edition (Hymn tune St. Helena). I have never warmed to the one in the Presbyterian Hymnal (probably because I knew the other one first; primacy matters). It's a weird, off-kilter kind of melody, but kind of haunting. The other one sounds sing-songy to me, like a nursery rhyme, and doesn't seem to fit the lyrics AT ALL. But the switching time signatures, and the restlessness of the key signature, all convey to me exactly what the lyrics convey. God is kind and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and that weirds us out and throws us off balance, as the song does. Listening to it has become a part of my daily prayer practice in Lent.

TL/DR, music gives me joy, and I put on repeat the things that are causing the endorphins to surge. Listen to two of my current faves below.

What music gives you joy?