My Music Playlist
Kai Alfonso in Ang Pinoy Stories
May 29, 2020 • 3 min Read
If somebody asks you what song best describes your life right now, what will that be? Music is definitely good company when you want the mood to turn good or simply drown your thoughts while you literally drown yourself to tears.
With music, you don’t even need a time travel machine. It never fails to transport you back in time. It comforts a heart that longs for a glimpse of yesterday. There is always that familiar song and melody that, like sad movies, almost always, makes us cry.
I love listening to music, but there are times that I don’t want to so I will filter or delete what’s on my playlist. Like a kind of pruning. There are days when I just simply stop listening at all. What good is a song if it has not been listened to for a long time? Sometimes, I even associate music with noise.
For many years, I just find myself out of melody.
There was a time when I have to search for songs that I would hear on the radio especially those that put me on the last song syndrome. I would then save it on my playlist. I would follow one good singer, searched the songs and saved them. I used to go for the beautiful rhymes, melodies, and lyrics then my heart began to flutter listening to them every day. Until the magic lost its hold and I eventually stopped.
I would hear songs while taking a taxi, from an officemate’s cellphone, from my son’s music station, and I enjoyed them. My playlist is gone and I realize that there may be a reason to it. On days that there is not a song playing, I am listening to my new kind of music. The silence surrounding me becomes the rhythm for the lyrics and the melodies come when I laugh, cry, or sigh. Silence has become good company.
Lately, I’ve been watching Korean dramas one after another and while at it, there’s only one thing that really connects me to the story the whole time and even after I finished watching them. It’s the soundtrack. Wherever the story takes me, music is there to move me right into the moment.
Once again, I was downloading music to listen to — music that led me to the plots and twists of the stories, their ups and downs, their struggles and disappointments, the laughters, the tears and, most importantly, the times that they overcome losses and fears.
Today I listen more to songs from Korean dramas and my playlist is bulging. I can listen the whole night to my Korean playlist. My son and niece would even tease me, “You don’t even understand the lyrics. Why bother listening?” I admit I don’t comprehend the lyrics, but that doesn’t bother me at all.
I know the melodies that inspired my Korean heroes to create their own triumphs and knowing their songs also inspires me to go for my own. For me, these little sparks of inspiration are all that matters. These tell me to go on, move on, dream on, as far as my imagination goes, as many steps as my feet could make and sway and dance, and with my fingers snapping to the beat, and my head nodding to the rhythm.
These are the same feelings I allow to come out and lead me when I tune in to silence. We don’t get to fully understand the moment of stillness until the rhythm flows and we sway to the beat and our hearts dance to the melody.
Music is liberating if we allow it — not to chase silence with noise but to allow silence to usher in beauty and let it shine; not to drown the realities of our lives but to let out life’s true melodies.
What’s playing for you today?
