What impact does listening to music have on you?

Is it an art form that you listen to on the radio on your way to work? Or in your office, or while you get your teeth cleaned? Or at a festival, while you’re eating and talking with friends? Or in a bar, when you’re having a drink?

How often do you really listen to music, not as background noise to some other activity? Why does music have such an impact on some people and not others? Why do some need it, like food and drink, while others don’t really care that much? It’s truly a mystery.

I’ve heard music called “the language of emotions.” It’s amazing how a song can bring you back to a particular period or event in your life. Joseph and I were driving to work this morning and an oldie-but-goodie (from our era, anyway) came on the radio.

Apparently this song, as cliché as it may seem, had a pretty deep impact on both of us. Now, don’t laugh, but the song was Peter Noone (of Herman and the Hermits—yeah we’re really baby boomers, huh?) singing “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got A Lovely Daughter.” This is never a tune I would have thought would stay anywhere in my consciousness, but hearing it this morning having not listened to it for a very long time immediately brought to mind the first time I ever heard it: I was about 15, and had spent my babysitting money on an LP with the song. I was in my bedroom playing it when my mother arrived home from shopping at the supermarket. My daddy called to me to help unload the groceries, and I can clearly remember that it was summer, what my room looked like, and my small plastic record player.

Joseph says he can remember being in the back of his parents’ bakery in Brooklyn, asking his father for 35 cents to buy the 45.

I find this so weird and wonderful—to be able to recollect long-lost thoughts. Music can evoke, music can make us dance, feel deeply romantic, nostalgic, elated, somber or sad, silly or happy, poetic, funny, thoughtful or even make us analytical. It covers the spectrum of human emotion. But this assumes that you actually listen to it.

It concerns me that more people don’t take the time to listen to music anymore. It’s a background to other activities. I worry that the people in power, who only see music as an addendum to our party town, don’t give music its due as an art form that has literally changed lives.

Using music as an emotional connection to attract visitors to the city—and keep locals from leaving—is very powerful. Let’s face it: music creates a much stronger attachment than alcohol. It’s time that we ditch our image of a party city (leave it to Las Vegas), and work on a new image for New Orleans: the nation’s musical birthplace.