Google tells me that I’ve got a song in my music library with 1500+ plays. I’ve got a few others with over 1200 plays, and a couple more approaching 1000.
I believe Google, too, though I know these numbers actually understate the reality.
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Part of me wishes that these were songs by Sam Phillips, or T-Bone Burnett, or Led Zeppelin, or Heart. That would feel much cooler. But the truth is that the play count of songs by those artists don’t even come close.
That’s because I’m not really listening to these songs as songs. They are more like meditation.
The album is Midori’s Bali. It’s categorized as “New Age,” which I find mildly distressing—I’m not much of a woo-woo kind of guy, really. Nonetheless…
I’ve listened to other music by Midori. It wasn’t easy to find, at least until relatively recently, because, for the longest time, Google and others all confused this Midori—a pseudonym of a very prolific musician named Medwyn Goodall—with a famous Japanese-born violinist. That Midori is an important artist—a well-respected instrumentalist, of course, but also a pretty hard-core activist, international educator, and writer. (Her biography is worth checking out.)
There’s also a melon liqueur of the same name, which makes me happier than it should.
But search engines finally got better at distinguishing among Midoris, and I was able to find more music by this Midori—and discovered I really don’t like his other albums nearly as much. (I never actually checked out the work he does under his real name….) They feel much more “New Age-y”—leaning more into (as Goodall’s website puts it) “Healing arts [and] therapy” than “ethnic music.”
The fact that I like Bali so much more than his other music may be as much nostalgia as anything. For years, the Younger struggled to fall asleep, and Bali became the soundtrack as I waited for him to drift off to dreamland. (This is why I know I heard it many more times than Google says—it was on the Younger’s iPod, which doesn’t report to Google.)
But I don’t think it’s just nostalgia. Bali does some things that other albums by Midori, and other albums in this New Age genre, don’t do.
Bali has, alas, the New Age-y airy synths, and when a song goes weak in the knees, it’s usually the synths. But the instruments—Indian, Chinese, and Japanese wood flutes; finger cymbals and dragon drum— are real, not electronic, and played subtly and well. And though he incorporates nature sounds into the mix—fountains, or streams, or gentle waves, or chirping birds—it isn’t one of those “Nature Sounds” albums, where the focus is (for example) the waves, with airy synths over it. He uses nature sounds as an instrument.
So my favorite song on the album, “Forgotten Temple”—a 16 1/2 minute piece—makes me feel like I’m walking through an abandoned temple, overgrown with plants (don’t ask how I “hear” plants hanging from stone walls… synesthesia, perhaps?) with a stream working its way through the ruins. And there’s a point in the song where I feel myself turning a corner and startling a flock of birds, who all take flight en masse.
And I still feel that, 1300+ listens later.
I know this is odd. With most music, I reach a point where I need a break. My all-time favorite album—Sam Phillips’s Cruel Inventions—kept me intrigued for months, but at some point I needed to listen to something else for awhile (probably T-Bone Burnett’s Talking Animals). Or, occasionally, I’d discover a song that I’d play far too many times; I remember stumbling across Toy Matinee’s “Last Plane Out” and Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life” and playing them repeatedly until others in the house cried out for mercy. But even they eventually got old.
In all those cases, I needed a break. But with Bali, I haven’t ever felt that need.
Of course, as I said, I’m listening to Bali more as a meditative tool than as music, per se. It helps me focus when I am working through life issues in my journal. It calms me when I’m feeling angry, or anxious, or overwhelmed. It slows my mind down on those (blessedly rare) insomniac nights. And it’s replaced Headspace (which I wholeheartedly recommend) as my focus for meditation, when I get around to it (less than I used to, but probably worth getting back into).
Nevertheless, it is music. It’s familiar enough that it just washes over me when I need it to. But when I stop to listen, I still hear things I either haven’t noticed before—or, I suppose, had just forgotten: a syncopated drum, a bird’s wing, a trill of a flute.
I’m not suggesting that it’s a great album, or that it will work the same way for you. It seems weird to me. But I’d be interested to know if I’m the only one with such a relationship to a musical work.