Won’t it be Grand

My Grandpa was a preacher. He hosted a small service every Sunday in a quaint little building with old wooden church pews that had velvet cushions. Despite the fact that they may have looked inviting with their vintage charm, they’d make your butt fall asleep faster than anything I’d ever sat on. The place always smelled like old paper. Which is fitting, I guess, given the fact that every pew kept at least 10 bibles and a hymn book to go with it. The hymn books were mostly red but not a new red. They were more of a brick red, and they were old and some were tattered. They showed their age the way the building did, but the songs were still the same.

So I guess this is where it started. The songs that still get stuck in my head some 15 years later. The one that first comes to mind will always be “In the Sweet By and By.” I can hear Kieths voice clear as day bellowing out the first words and everyone else chiming in soon after. That song may be the first one that comes to my mind, but “Jesus Loves Me” is a close second. My Grandpa sang it for us. I know he did… but man oh man talk about a voice. The quietest man I knew made that building feel enormous with the way his song would carry and I could hear my grandmas sweet song trailing behind. The music is what I remember. Now I don’t believe in God. Honestly I don’t know if I ever did, but I loved to sing those songs.

However, the bliss of naivety didn’t last forever. A few short years later and I’m in my room listening to my first Eminem album I downloaded onto my MP3 player from YouTube. I knew (and still know) every word to every song on the Recovery album and I’m fairly certain everyone in my home knew that. I felt untouchable. I remember letting the music define the way I walked and the way I portrayed myself. I was carefree and selfish. I was powerful and strong and I was out for me and only me. For a long time I was the only one I needed. I shouted the fierce, explicit words along side Eminem, Lil Wayne, Kat Dahlia and anything else that I felt was good enough for me. I didn’t appreciate the way it made me feel. I thought that was just who I was. Surely music didn’t have power over me. Surely I was in control… right?

I remember the first sad song I heard; Runaway Love. Yes you know the song. I remember finally realizing what was being said. I remember realizing that music wasn’t just a tune, it was a story. It was someone’s life. I wasn’t entitled to it. Then I cried like I knew who the song was about and even though I felt the tears climb down my cheeks, I felt anger and pity and melancholy. I felt these things that I didn’t know I could feel for myself let alone someone else. Why did I care? Why did I cry? Even so I just let it happen. I listened to those songs that made me cry over and over again. Runaway Love, Whiskey Lullaby, My Immortal, good lord the list goes on. I don’t think I could continue with my day unless I felt sad for someone. Maybe I just felt sad for myself. Maybe that’s why the music stopped so soon.

I was done. The music started to bore me. I’d lose track of the lyrics in my head or I’d just get annoyed. I couldn’t be bothered to listen to music when so much else was taking up space. When I did listen, it was something off the wall, out of the blue; classical, opera, soul rock, jazz. I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find what I wanted. For a long time, I was the only one I had. My heart was too full. My head was too fuzzy. I’d get drunk on a bottle of wine and sing a Paolo Nutini song in the shower before I get into bed and watch the same show I’d been watching for months. The next day I’d do dishes with Frank Sinatra and Etta James. Maybe later I’d read a book I had no intentions of finishing while I listened to some classical music by someone whose name I couldn’t even pronounce. I was so scattered. My heart yanked me in so many different directions and my mind just let me go.

Then I met him; the boy, the man, the lover. I met a genre I’d never heard of. It was music with so much hate in it but at the same time so much reality and twice as much power. I can’t claim it as my own but I shared it and quickly adopted it as a part of my many scattered pieces. We hated the world together through music that defied God. Ah see there he is again: God. Now I think of “In the Sweet Bye and Bye”. Now I think of my Grandpa. The sweet man with the powerful voice. I think about the way I felt sitting in the pew watching him preach about something beautiful I couldn’t comprehend. But mostly I think of the song “Won’t it be Grand”. That’s the song we sang at his funeral. I didn’t know the lyrics so I had to read them from a piece of paper that someone must have copied from one of those red hymn books. I know them now. I know every word to that damned song.

When people ask me what kind of music I listen to, I can’t give them a genuine answer simply because I don’t know. I have listened to all of it. I still do because whether I like it or love it or hate it with all that I am, there is a part of me somewhere in the past that is stuck with those songs and those stories. Some parts I chose to leave, some parts I revisit, and some parts I carry with me like a burden. Maybe I’m still shattered, or maybe this is just who I was meant to be. Either way, I owe everything I have to the person I once was not that long ago.