Why I love Desperate Songs...

I have been noticing a trend, year after year. I am pretty sure that I am the last person in my life to arrive at this conclusion (mostly because in my adolescent years you could find me on any day declaring the lyrics to any Dashboard, Jimmy Eat World, or Sufjan song you could find) but I just love emo-type songs.

Ok, before the "daddy doesn't love me hair" and Avril Leveign jokes kick in, hold on a sec and hear me out. I love emotional music, yes, but not the kind of music that you want to mock me for. or maybe you still do, but who cares.

When I was 12 years old, my brother got really good at playing guitar. His fingers would move over the strings and produce something that lifted parts of my heart I didn't even know existed until that day. A single note, and then there were three, four, seven. They wove together creating something so sweet and enchanting, but haunting. In the good way something can be haunting, leaving you feeling an ache for more when it is over. He told me about his heart, his hopes, his sadness, his anger, all without a single word. He introduced me to Goo Goo Dolls and Dave Matthews, Bela Fleck and Phish. He played song after song, music ranging from Creedence Clearwater, to OAR.

Given some of my love for these bands has died, sometimes as popularity rises my love fades. It has nothing to do with being a snob, but mostly with the idea that my secrets were no longer safe in this music. You see, my love affair with music grew ever stronger and more personal with each note and lyric. I could escape here, and no one could find me, because music becomes so deeply personal that it reflects our secret clubhouse handshakes we created when we were five. Everyone everywhere was learning the words and encrouching on my own little secret garden of music that I thought was built just for me. Selfish and foolish, yes, that I thought these songs were mine to have and hide in my heart. But, it created in me the inspiration to create, love, and live hungry for more life and more stories.

I love the kind of music that makes your heart break for no reason. I love the guitar chords that someone strings and twines together telling a story with no words, but at the same time every word it needs. I love imagining the life and blood and sweat behind each moving note. I love the story my imagination creates in the silences and the poetry that pours from someone else's imagination.

More importantly, I love the story a good emo like song tells. I am not a sadist. I love happy music, too. There is just nothing like the bond that is built when someone lets you see them in their rawest, rarest, most vulnerable form. When they share their tragedy in a beautiful and haunting way. I think it is because it reminds me a little of the wonder of God. How He can take anything ugly and make it a beautiful thing, nay, create beauty springing forth like mad from it. I do not enjoy others pain, I enjoy being able to connect with someone at the most basic human level. The level where we need each other, need love, and need to know it will be ok. There is hope and though all our stories are unique, we are not so different after all, underneath it all.

I love heartbreakingly beautiful songs, and for this, I find a new way to love the people around me in a most gracious, glorious, and God given way.