Why We Need Music

Because the body knows things the mind won't admit— and music is the language the body speaks when words have failed their shift. A song you haven't heard in twenty years plays and suddenly you are seventeen and the car smells like rain and someone you've forgotten is singing badly and you loved them and you didn't know it yet. That's music: a time machine that runs on melody and requires no ticket, no permission, no readiness. The dancer knows this best— the body given to the beat, the surrender that looks like freedom because it is. We don't play music at funerals because the dead can hear. We play it because the living need something stronger than language to hold their grief. And at weddings— the first dance: two people swaying to a song that will outlast the love or be outlasted by it. Either way, the song remembers.