You're gonna get sick of me ranting about Noah Gundersen

But his album came out on Tuesday and I have been letting it soak into me slowly like healing waters. Oof. Near perfection which I totally saw coming but it still gave me those unexpected moments where the music swells like a tide and I get to let myself wash away for a minute. I am sitting in my dining room right now with the track Boathouse ringing in my ears. The violin is pulling in an almost painful way and Noah is singing a song about a broken man with a broken family and when the chorus kicks in I feel as broken as the man in the song does. 

Noah is playing a sold out show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood this week. I will be there, and I'm dragging my sister Christy along with me. So far I've only managed to talk my best friend into being as obsessed as I am, but by Friday night I know I will have Christy on board. Because she has emotions and the Gundersen family is spectacularly good at manipulating emotions and playing them with the same talent that drives their voices and words. 

Christy brought up an interesting story last night. She pointed out that when we discovered Mumford and Sons it was because a friend of hers made a point to play them for her and she wrote down to look them up. This is significant because when we fell head first into the world of music that the Mumfies opened up we gained some of our favorite artists. Without those boys there would be no Laura Marling when I feel like I need another jaded woman to sympathize with. There would be no Avetts to help me feel grounded, and no Johnny Flynn to make me feel like rereading a Shakespeare play to find all the meanings I missed the first time round. Yes, the odds are that we would have stumbled into this music eventually, but it's so woven into the time in which I discovered it that I can't imagine what those days would look like without those songs. 

These are songs that I freely allow to transport me to different places, or change my mood up or down because they are worthy of that right. They vibrate at the same frequencies as my mind and heart and wholy belong in my world. They have been pulled into my identity like twigs into a birds nest. There is no way to dislodge them without undoing a huge chunk of me. 

So I am grateful that Christy chose to spend that day with her friend. I am grateful that he knew that Christy would enjoy that music. I'm grateful that she was listening and turned around to share that music with me. My world is richer for the music I have in it. 

With that in mind I will continue my one woman quest to push Noah Gundersen, and Justified, and Keats, and anything else I can find beauty and value in. I hope people will do me the same courtesy even when it does feel like a political campaign. Because our lives are improved when we connect to something, and my life in this respect gets a little better every day.