I’ve occasionally come across a particular notion in the music community that the more we listen to the more we build expectations, higher and higher until the bar’s raised unattainably high and we in turn forget what it’s like for that threshold to be met in the first place. I’ve never explicitly agreed with this thought because of how nonsensical it’s always come across – “shouldn’t we come to appreciate art more the more time we take to truly understand it?,” I usually feel, and yet it still can strike me subconsciously, at times. I sometimes catch myself thinking what Theodore, the central character of Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her, once wondered to himself, if I’m “not gonna feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I’ve already felt.” And that thought’s a scary one, because I never want to lose that ability to tear up to a song, to get lost in the rhythm of a good screamo song when I feel that desire.

Ultimately I know this fear to be misguided, and don’t worry much about its implications either. I just mostly worry about the fact that this kind of pessimism, cynicism, what-have-you, is such an ingrained thought to me. When I find a new album I love, why am I so quick to worry about when those impressions will fade? I listened to Dream Sequins by Nmesh several nights back, and I was so taken by it – never had I heard an album that seemed to have such a solid grasp on simultaneously stereo space and stylistic diversity. But my next thought was “well, when am I going to stop feeling this satisfaction?”

Yikes, right? Such a fatalistic notion- the one that we enjoy something until we don’t and that we just can’t return to that same plane of satisfaction. Surely it’s too much to ask that we at least have an opportunity to document these feelings, to transcribe them when we feel we understand them well enough? Because after all, who really knows if we’ll experience them again.

This is what music writing has become for me, the practice of me trying to put into words the feelings I don’t want to forget about. There are so many different kinds of gripping music out there, and all of them can make us feel so many things – and we have a right to document those so we can always remember the potential of music, and all kinds of art in general, and where it brings us- mentally and emotionally. Write about Carrie & Lowell some if it makes you feel some weird things, and also write about it if you simply like how it makes you feel (although I would not consider you an actual human being if this were the case.) Go back in time to the way your first felt about your favorite record, and see if you truly understand it. If you know why you have those feelings, your thoughts on it are probably pretty interesting. And if you have no clue, then that means you have a chance to understand it more thoroughly if you’d like to. This is where writing can come in, and where it’s come in many times for me – that feeling of understanding an album far better after having written about it some, to myself or to a website.

So if anything, my bottom line is that passion is not only intrinsically rewarding to us, it’s valuable to others too. Even if only five other people read your thoughts about your favorite rap album, if one person changes perspective a bit because of your words, then that kind of interaction is meaningful and significant, to you as well as the other person. The ball is in the reader’s court, at that point – they can challenge your thoughts or they can expand on them, and both of you come closer to understanding your relationship between 1) yourself and 2) the music itself. And that to me feels like the goal of all this, the reason why we all rank our favorite albums from each year and then share those with each other – we wanna make sure we aren’t missing anything, that we’ve got as tight of a grasp on the highlights of music as we possibly can.