Ungrounded Outlet

The other day at, Jason and Stephanie’s wedding (holy crap! Jason and Stephanie are finally married! It’s the most expected and yet exciting thing you can think of!), I told Shuler, “Get a Billie Holiday best-of CD. It will change your life.”

Since then, I’ve been listening to a lot of Lady Day, and my God it’s fantastic.

Until now, I’ve really just heard one song at a time mixed into the random shuffle on my iPod or whatever. And it was good, of course (because it’s Billie Freaking Holiday)…but since the wedding, I’ve been listening to just a lot of her songs in a row.

And it’s just unbelievable. After the third or fourth song, her voice just takes you to another place. You experience every single possible human emotion all at once. It’s not something that can be captured with words, at least not by me.

I had a girlfriend once (Belinda; since I’ve only had two or three, not naming her would be weird and silly) who really liked Billie Holiday. I think she wrote a few papers about Holiday in high school. On a couple of occasions, she tried to introduce me to the music; but I really just wasn’t at a place in my life for that sort of thing. I was young and stupid, I know, but so be it.

Yet now, I see what I was missing and I feel like I wasted so many years. Why is it that I waited until I was twenty-four to really listen to music? It’s like I was deaf my entire life, but now I can hear and it’s…incredible and amazing and beautiful.

I mean, I still like all the stuff I used to like…but some of it is just in an entirely different universe. There’s music and then there’s Music, you know? And it’s all good. But some of it is wonderful.

So, I’ll repeat the advice I gave to Shuler: Go get a Billie Holiday CD. It will change your life.