Tonight, my apartment was a little island of hometown, USA, in the sea of Chinese Beijing. (Is that cheesy?) I’ve come to Beijing ahead of my wife and child to clean up the apartment. With no one around, I put on some music as I cleaned. I started with The Raconteurs, Consolers of the Lonely. I really like a good album. You can see the rest of the music I listened to on this YouTube Music playlist. Here are some of the high points.

Consolers of the Lonely

First off, the title track switches between about 76 BPM and 98 BPM. The last two bars of the guitar intro look like this, with the drummer clicking at juuuust a little bit slower than a 4/3 tuplet.

They go back and forth between these tempos throughout the song. It’s a nice effect. It’s also hard to do live, so it looks like they just go double speed for simplicity.

Moving on. The best song on this album must be “The Switch and the Spur.” It tells the story of an injured fugitive evading on horseback through a hostile desert. Like any good work of art, this song shows great unity among all its parts. The instrumentation and arrangement reflect the content of the lyrics and evoke imagery of classic western films. Along with the use of metaphor in the lyrics, these parts all work together to create that strong sense of satisfaction you might get looking at an oil painting or pulling off that perfect guitar solo. Of the lyrics, I love the following stanza in particular:

The saddle spotted with sweat and blood
The poison pumps through his veins
There’s no stopping this, and now he’s powerless
Still holding the reigns

It’s clever, isn’t it? It dumps a boring cliché on its head.

Appreciation for “Like a Stone”

Moving on to the playlist mentioned earlier. Some highlights include several classic songs by Green Day and Red Hot Chili Peppers. But the song which stood out to me the most, and the reason why I’m writing this, is “Like a Stone” by Audioslave.

My best and oldest friend Steve and his father had always loved Chris Cornell. When I was in middle school, I remember his father opining that Cornell was the best rock singer of all time. I thought he was great too, but young me disagreed. I thought clearly, the best singers in modern music would be found in heavy metal, not 90s alternative rock. Geoff Tate. Russell Allen. Come on! I never really took the time to listen closely to any of Chris Cornell’s work.

At the time, and for years after, I had my head buried up the ass of the world of guitar music, with the likes of Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Randy Rhoads, and Jake E. Lee. As I’ve matured, though, I have gained a greater appreciation for other music. In particular, I’ve started to enjoy lyrics with strong metaphors and imagery. “Like a Stone” has that.

The song features two people, a speaker and a listener. Each time we hear the chorus, we learn more about why the narrator wants to be in the other’s house. The first time, it’s a simple statement of fact. He reads that good people can choose where they’d like to spend the afterlife, and he chooses the listener’s house. By the next time we hear the chorus, we’ve learned more about the two people’s relationship. The listener had “led [the narrator] on” in their house, implying that later events caused some disappointment or regret for the narrator. Sure enough, the bridge confirms this, setting the house of the final chorus in his dreams, as he carries his regret throughout his life. It’s great poetry.

The song’s theme of regret carries some significance for me today, something that I wouldn’t have understood as a younger man. I regret a lot from my childhood, because I feel I hadn’t lived well. I missed some opportunities and chances for great experiences because I was afraid. I was afraid of relaxing and showing myself to other people, so I hid myself behind my argumentativeness and my love of guitar. I carried an electric guitar and a god-awfully heavy 60-watt amplifier to school nearly every day for seven years to play during any free time. Really, I was just avoiding the pain of looking lonely in front of others. The high of playing guitar was anesthesia.

It wasn’t a productive use of my time. The social skills I didn’t develop during my formative years have had a significant impact on the course of my life. Because of my lack of social skills, I may have gotten married too early. I don’t regret the family I have now, but many interpersonal hardships could have been avoided if I had stepped more out of my comfort zone as a child.

C’est la vie… What can you do? At least I’ve come to recognize the importance of interpersonal skills, even if developing them is slow and painful—and riskier as an adult than it would have been to do as a child. This is why art is important. It gives us an opportunity for expression and contemplation. A good life would be incomplete without it. And it’s a gift that music is practically free and universally accessible online. I cherish the opportunity to listen. It helps me grow—even while I’m cleaning my apartment.