Live.

It took me too long to figure this one out, but it finally hit me. There's a reason why they call live music live music. It is because you are truly alive when listening to it. The difference between the two words is absolutely nothing. Live and live. Maybe this is because all of life is live, its always right now, always in the now. I have seen a decent amount of shows in the past year. (Consider the Source, The McLovins, Company of Thieves, Beats Antique, Fun., Phish, Santana, The Allman Brothers, Gathering of the Vibes fest, Yale String Quartet, and Suitcase Rodeo, with a few others.) A lot of it isn't just unlike the others, but on complete opposite sides of the music spectrum. What I have taken in is that I can be inspired in so many different ways. I can be inspired to laugh, to cry, to love, to hate, to everything. I've had the honor of being a part of so many spectacular live moments that it's like learning a new language. Eventually you learn more accurate words to describe situations and occurrences, so why would you ever going back to only using the first word you ever learned? The difference here is that the language I've been learning over the past year is music. It's not that haven't been able to speak it, but this is the first year I've gone to a considerable amount of shows, so I think of it as the first time I've really listened. Listening is important. For a perfect harmony there needs to be an even flow of giving and taking, listening and speaking. I've been getting closer and closer to this harmony, and musically I've never felt more comfortable in my life. I used to always wonder why people mindlessly bopped around looking like foolish baboons while music was being force fed to them. I always appreciated the creation of it, the composition of it. But where I was absurdly wrong was that to appreciate the music as a composer... a creator, you must appreciate it within the audience, feeling it with every limb of your body. It something much bigger than a single soul, something that should be deeply respected from within because from within it is felt. It's not what is being portrayed that makes live music alive. It is the fact that something is being portrayed at all, as simple or complex as one can desire. It's another language within itself, and now I find myself wondering how I could ever go back. Simple answer is that I can't and I won't. Emotions and feelings rise above language all too often, but what takes time to realize is that emotions and feelings coincide with the language of music and the arts. It is something us humans will eventually adopt as our primary languages because they are much more sophisticated, much more complex and detailed, but for now, we will carry on struggling with our basic, primitive words, sentences, and verbal haberdashery. We will remain who we are. Dead.