I’ve found non-musicians frequently thinking of musicians, and especially of musicians like me who have been/still are into kind of complex kinds of music sometimes, that they can only listen in an analyzing way to music, figuring out what the musicians (and in my case especially the guitarist) are doing and how they are doing it, and what the chord progressions are and so on.
Well, here’s news for you: I don’t listen like that at all to music, unless I purposely have to do so (like when I have to figure out a song that I have to play myself in a band or for a recording).
Sometimes, music hits you – and yes, me too – so hard that it hurts. Hurts in a good way, though. It seems to release all these sad or bad things you have been bottling up inside, and then this one song or composition seems to say all that you have been wanting to say for so long but couldn’t. I suppose it was all summarized in that in that famous line by the Beatles: “…take a sad song and make it better”.
So yes, that’s how we musicians, or at least me, listen as well.
This one by Beth Hart hit home, the other day (yes I know, my rant about YouTube, but this one doesn’t have any ads):
iplayguitaronline 