Music and the Magic of Storytelling

This past week I wrote a song. I know! Weird, right?

Specifically, I wrote lyrics to the music my amazing and talented friend wrote. I'd never written song lyrics in my life, but I enthusiastically said yes. And I began. This is how stories start.

Stories are embedded in every song--lyrics or not--and we shape the music to our lives that resonate with us at various points in time. Music and memory swimming through each other over landscapes and people and situations.

Every country I travel to, every town I live in, every person I meet on this journey has a story that collides with my own. Every song I hear and every book I read becomes a part of it as well.

Stories lurk in the eyes of lonely expats in every seaside dive bar and in the souls of fishermen working the shore in the far northwest regions--the towering volcanoes of Eastern Java loom across the Bali Straight, hiding their own stories.

Stories hide behind the elaborate walls of family compounds and temples scattered over the island and echo down the busy streets of Ubud, the sleepy roads of Amed and Lovina, and the tucked away beaches of Bingin and Padang Padang and Canggu.

I have spent most of my life telling stories or writing stories or watching stories or listening to stories all the while living my own story--letting them all jumble together to create something of a surreal existence in my mind.

Stories permeate our lives--always walking in and out of the ones surrounding us while simultaneously living our own. We tend to fill in the gaps of what we don't see or hear with ideas we draw from our own stories--we do this with the songs we hear, the literature we read, and the lives we brush up against. There is always more to someone's story than what we see and read and hear.

I wrote some lyrics that tell a story, but when someone else reads or hears it, it will take on another meaning altogether--always morphing as it enters the periphery of the next person's story.

Do you tend to attach meaning to songs you hear and stories you read to reflect your own life? Do you tend to fill in the gaps when you cross paths with someone else's story? If you are reading this, most likely our lives have collided in one way or another--tell me a story about how our lives collided!