Let It Loose

I am in the midst of a full-blown love affair with Exile on Main St., the Rolling Stones’ ragged masterpiece from 1972. What began as a flirtation last summer, when I put “Torn and Frayed” and “Loving Cup” onto a playlist that was in frequent rotation, has become something much deeper and truer. I cannot stop listening.

At the same time, I’ve had an epiphany about music generally. If you’re like me, you’ve had the experience of listening to a particular song over and over and over. From time to time, something gets in there, and it can be weeks before the need to stop hearing it on a constant basis fades. This happened to me with Stew’s “Come Down Now” a few months back and then a few weeks ago with “This is the Sea” by the Waterboys. It’s happened hundreds of times in the course of my life.

Just a few days ago, it finally occurred to me what’s going on: in these instances, the songs are my soul’s attempt to communicate directly with me, bypassing the brain and delivering the message to a much more core place. And the beautiful, circular magic of it is that the songs are also the voice of the songwriter’s soul, giving expression to something true in a language another soul can understand. It’s mystical, and real.

Now I’m paying close attention to such songs and the way they make me feel and what they have to tell me. I should point out that it’s not necessarily the lyrics that I’m talking about, although they can certainly contribute, but it’s the whole of the song: music, tone, layers, words.

Exile on Main St. is essentially shaping my own personal and creative manifesto. This album is loose, unselfconscious, and soulful to a thrilling degree, and I am declaring those as the three qualities I most wish to cultivate in my writing and artwork, and in my life as whole.

Below I share my soul’s current, urgent communiqué: “Let it Loose,” a song from Exile that will take you somewhere sublime.