How To Judge Your Music

At the Uni­ver­sity of New Mex­ico, I had a teacher that lived so sim­ply he only had to work every other year. He was an Amer­i­can Bud­dhist. On his off years, he would back­pack around India and South­east Asia. He was well into his sev­en­ties and still keep­ing this rou­tine. He was an odd sort of fel­low always smil­ing — like he knew some sort of life secret the rest of us missed.
He had many wise things to say. When it comes to music, he said on thing that has always stuck with me: “If your music does not bring tears to your eyes, it is infe­rior.” He is right. There is a lot of noise out there, but lit­tle real music. Maybe the most pop­u­lar music out there says some­thing about our times — angry and cheap.
Qual­ity has no sub­sti­tute. You can find it in art the same way you find it in music — with a tear. Movies are judged the same way. Say all we will about “chick flicks” it is the movie that makes us cry as well as laugh that we rec­om­mend to oth­ers. We hunger for the emo­tions that trig­ger our weak­nesses as well as our strengths. Songs sung with a knot in the throat tell of things in which we ulti­mately believe. Some reli­gious songs will do that. Some sec­u­lar songs are just as effec­tive.
Songs are uni­ver­sal sto­ries of emo­tion. With or with­out words, music speaks a uni­ver­sal lan­guage of pro­found emo­tions and com­plex exis­tence. The finest things are not said but sung. They are played on flutes or alone on late night lonely gui­tars. Bands play for the crowds, but the solo shep­herd plays the sim­ple instru­ment of the soul alone. Our tear-music is a cry of our deep­est desires. Some­how it weaves together all of the dis­parate expe­ri­ences we call our lives.
The next time a song brings a tear to your eyes, play it again and see where it leads you. Tears are what recon­nect our dis­jointed expe­ri­ences. They heal. At dif­fi­cult times in my life, I have had to pull off the road to cry because of a song that tells me of where I am in life — how­ever painful or joy­ful. Those moments are the ones we remem­ber, because we re-member. We put back together that which has become broken…and the glue is a tear.