resonance

Isn't it weird when you're listening to a song and all of a sudden it feels as though the songwriter has read your mind or something and is voicing your thoughts/emotions exactly? Does that happen to you? My iTunes was on shuffle the other day, and when a certain song that I haven't heard in a while came on, I immediately wanted to say, "Yeah! That's exactly what I want to say!" or "Right on!" or something equivalently dorky.

Maybe it's just because it's a song about something that happens to lots of people and so there's a sort of generally-accepted way of feeling or reacting when that happens and this particular artist happened to articulate well that cliche reaction.

(I'm not comfortable revealing the song or the artist because I feel like it's too personal. It's as if you knowing what song it was would allow you to know exactly how I secretly feel. Isn't that weird?)

This is not an original experience I'm having, this recognizing myself in someone else's art. James Baldwin wrote, "It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive or who had ever been alive."

Most commonly, at least most commonly noticed by me, this phenomenon gets manifested in people's away messages on AIM, or "Favorite "Quote" sections in Facebook. Things can get pretty emo in those two contexts. I'm not talking about people quoting universal-truthism kinds of things, but more like this-is-how-I-feel-right-now type things.

I'm listening to the song in question again right now, and I have to say, it's pretty intense. How interesting...