Why do you play music? Why do you play the harmonica?

I like to ask myself these questions from time to time, and the answers keep changing.

What is it about music that is so compelling? I have had one insight lately that keeps asking me to get it down, spread it around, and see what comes of it.

It is this: Music gives us a way to take the pain we have inside of us and use it to create something beautiful.

For me, this works on many levels. I remember a night about 15 years ago when I had a gig with a large R & B band for a private party, and my back really hurt.  It was too late to cancel, so I left the house bent over, wondering how I was going to make it through the night. Halfway through the gig, the crowd was dancing, we were on a roll, and I was having a ball. I forgot that my back hurt.

By the end of the night I was totally free of pain, and it did not come back. When I walked through the front door that night, my wife Jane took one look at me and said “OK, now I know why you have to play music.”

This sort of thing has happened to me many times – various physical problems go away when I have a good session of playing music.

I also find music to be one of the best ways to deal with emotional pain. There have been times in my life when the only time I felt really sane was when I was listening to great music or lost in playing music. When a romance fell apart, various times when my life was in ruins, when I had to quit drinking and using drugs. These were  times when listening or playing music gave me the the feeling that everything was really OK down deep no matter what was going on in my life.

This is why I love playing and listening to the blues. I hear the blues in all kinds of music. Blues to me is the musical expression of ecstatic grief. Ecstatic grief comes from feeling everything you are able to feel, including the aliveness of pain. Not fighting with the way your life actually is, being completely open, waking up, and  telling it like it is. That’s the Blues.

I can live with pain when I feel the connection of pain to beauty. To me they are inseparable. I don’t think it is possible to have beauty without some element of pain.

I also don’t believe you become truly great at anything until you find a way to take the pain inside of you and use it as part of the process.

Great athletes, dancers, artists, computer programmers, chefs, politicians, musicians, all rise to the highest levels because they have found ways to transform pain into the beauty of art. If they could not do this, then at some point pain would shut them down, stop them from taking action, and when you stop taking actions, you die inside.

This is one of the reasons why I am unable to live without music. If I did not have this outlet, I would die. That’s all there is to it.

Maybe you feel the same way about music sometimes.

That’s one reason why I like having a harmonica in my pocket when I leave the house.