Some Songs Become Prayers

They transcend the genre of their vibration.

A dear friend of Joe’s told him over coffee last week that he thinks some songs become prayers over time. This struck me as absolutely true and deeply insightful.

Certain songs touch as such a level, stir inside with such intensity they seem to cross over form being lyrics and melody into something more. Into a kind of prayer.

What is a prayer?

This is obviously a deeply personal and individual question. I doubt it’s exactly the same for any two people. But there are general schools of thought.

Personally, I subscribe to Mary Oliver’s definition from the last half of her poem “The Summer Day”.

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

To pay attention, and I would add, with love and reverence.

Some songs call to us in that way. There is a vibration within us, one more fundamental and primal than thought, and like a magnet it is drawn to the same vibration within a song.

There is a fierce and sometimes inexplicable connection.

The song lodges in the throat of our soul.

Sometimes it stays there years, sometimes decades, sometimes a life. It stays with us until that particular prayer has somehow been answered or resolved.

It doesn’t mean we love the song any less, but it transforms from a prayer back into a song.

“Smile” by Ben Folds was such a song for me. There was a year-long period where I could not listen to it without crying and then something shifted inside me and I began enjoying it.

I still love it but it is no longer a prayer.

On the opposite side, “Blackbird” by Paul McCartney has and continues to be a prayer. It has been lodged deeply inside my soul for over twenty-six years.

And what is wonderful and fascinating to me is how for each person, the song that resonates at that prayerful vibration is different.

Its power is private.

Its intensity is wrapped around an individual dream.

That being said I do think there are certain songs that have found their way into our cultural collective soul. They seem to take on a kind of mythic significance that is large and in a Walt Whitman-esque way, contain multitudes.

It’s reminiscent of Joseph Campbell’s quote: Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.

And certain songs have a mythic dream vibration that crosses into prayer.