Keys and vulnerabilities

I'm a pretty rational, unemotional guy.  But there has always been a chink in my armor.  Music.  Music affects me more strongly than most people, I think.

A sad occurrence in real life can make me cry, sometimes.  A particular event might bring me to tears once or twice.  Very little except my mother's death and the events of 9/11 were able to bring me to tears more times than that — but even then, the sadness faded, and the ability to make me cry weakened over time.

But there are two words, two notes of music that bring me to tears without fail, every time I even think about them.  They're not from Scott Miller.  They're the final words of the musical Into the Woods:  "I wish."  As I wrote this paragraph, it had the same effect on me, undiminished, and wholly predictable.  Stephen Sondheim precisely targeted my weakness and dropped a bomb into it, not unlike Luke Skywalker blowing up the Death Star.

Sondheim did it with genius-level talent, but it doesn't take a Sondheim to slide through that gap in my armor.  Any stupid movie or TV show can make me cry, if the score is in a minor key and there's something on the screen that resonates with my life, my hopes, or my fears.  It happens again and again.  It always makes me feel foolish and easily manipulated.

As you already know if you've read this far, Scott Miller resonated with me.  I rank him with Sondheim; perhaps others might not.  No matter.

There are three things that caused Scott Miller's music to become locked into its place within my head.  The music, the pure sonic experience, was the first piece of the puzzle.  Scott Miller was equipped with a jailer's ring of minor keys; a circle of fifths, jangling with about a zillion chords.

It was all perfectly modulated to go cleanly through the hole in my armor.