"Art is How we Decorate Space, Music is How we Decorate Time.”

Hanging sounds.

The latest article from the great Ted Gioia is about his 10 favourite Paul McCartney post-Beatles musical moments. It’s well worth a read and a listen.

I only got one song in before I was sobbing on the couch.

The thing that broke me (and to be fair, I was feeling pretty breakable to begin with) was this 2022 Glastonbury performance of “I’ve Got a Feeling.”

Paul, in the flesh, duets with John Lennon via circa-1969 footage from the incredible Get Back documentary:

The song by itself doesn’t usually make me emotional. But seeing John as he was at the end of the ‘60s, singing on that rooftop, and Paul as he is now, 50 years on, hit me like a collapsing wall of amps.

The hereness of then.

I don’t know if it will affect you the same way. I suspect if you’ve watched all eight glorious hours of Get Back, it will.

That film made me feel as if I was living with the Beatles through the composition of Let It Be. It made them feel not like archival figures from distant history, but like living, breathing geniuses standing in the room with me.

Today, Paul is still a living, breathing genius.

And John isn’t.

Obviously I know that both John and George Harrison are gone. In the same way as my grandmother, and my father, and my aunt, and so many others are gone.

But sometimes you really feel it: that they were here, and now they’re not.

Songs of time travel.

I don’t think the quote in the title of this post — "art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.” – Jean-Michel Basquiat — is about traveling through time.

I interpret it as “you hang artwork on your wall to bring your space to life; you play songs to bring life to the moment.”

But there’s still an element of time travel in that.

Hearing a song that meant a lot to you at an earlier stage of your life can catapult you all the way back there in an instant.

And it can reveal — as the McCartney performance above did for me — the passage of time and its weight and meaning.

This morning I found myself randomly singing “No Need to Argue” by The Cranberries (that one is a nuclear-grade weeper).

I was suddenly a teenager in Washington, D.C. buying The Cranberries’ first album on cassette (!), and then in my early twenties experiencing a thousand emotions at once listening to that song on CD, and then my current self, relating to it in whole new ways, and then even a future version of me encountering it again, staggered by the force of meaning it will have acquired then.

The poignancy of it was further enhanced by the death of Dolores O’Riordan in 2018. Another genius no longer here to sing it herself.

Decor in various shades.

Clearly, I like crying on couches.

Yes, my musical taste tends toward the morose. But there’s so much joy to be found in decorating your time with anything that offers you an intense well of feeling.

Sometimes that’s happiness instead of sadness. If you’d like find yourself grinning for no particular reason, I recommend this:

If there’s a song that hit you hard when you were a teenager, or a twenty-something, or really at any stage of your life, I recommend putting it on now. Preferably loud. Preferably while you’re alone.

See what it does for your time.