All Over The Music Map

Film, television shows and books are all concerned with story. Story must have a setting or location, a time period and specific characters. A story must also have a beginning, a middle and an end. Music, however, can supply a setting, a time and characters but does not necessarily have to have the time arc of beginning, middle and end.

What I like about music, and I’ve heard other people say this a lot, is that a song can take you away to another time and place and although there may be characters and a story involved, it’s not so specific as to have an ending. That’s why I can listen to a particular song over and over again where I can’t really enjoy reading or watching the same story repeatedly. Once I know how a story ends I’m pretty much done with it, at least for a while. But a song will transport me to a time and place where I’m perfectly happy just to pass the time.

I see an album as being like a map. First of all let me explain that I speak in terms of an “album” rather than a “CD” since an album is a collection of songs that are meant to be listened to in a particular order while a CD is merely a technology delivery system.

A successful band is one that has a strong image that is reflected in its songs, its visual style and fashion, its sound, arrangement and instrumentation and often even its name. Successful bands usually represent something specific to their fans such as a geographical location or a cultural subculture, belief or attitude.

When a band makes an album it is as if they have created a page from a map. This map represents a particular location and the culture of the people who live in this location at a particular time period. Each song may tell a story of a character living in the location depicted by this map but the entire area is open for you, the listener, to explore. This is why you can journey repeatedly and often to the same “area” since you’re visiting a place where each visit can be different and personal.

When the band makes its next album it is creating another page to the map. If the band has progressed and improved their recording technique the next area may seem a little more advanced, or civilized . Think of the first album as a map page depicting a rural area and the second album as showing a town that’s adjacent to the rural area. The rural area hasn’t been replaced by the town but the map has expanded to now include the town.

The next album might represent an area of suburbs spreading out from the town and the album after that a major modern city on the other side of the suburbs. The rural area may seem old fashion and quaint compared to the city but it’s not really “older” but simply more distant from the modern areas and it  represents the “oldest” area of the map. All the areas of the map exist simultaneously and are all there to be visited at will although traveling from the city to the small town out to the farm land may seem like going back in time.

This, to me, is the magic of music.


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