The sounds of silence

Why you sometimes need to shut down the music to hear the music

The other day I had a long drive to a gig—some hours in the car alone under gray winter skies, on a straight-shot highway through monotonous scenery. Not a lot to look at, not a lot to do, not much traffic, cruise control taking over the gas pedal, just the hum of tires on pavement, and the car stereo…

Silent. 

My life and work is so entwined with music—playing it, writing it, writing about it, teaching it—that you might think I’d use any empty time on a road trip to immerse myself in some artist or album or demos or whatever. I do that sometimes, but I also savor periods of not listening to music, whether I’m driving or walking or just idling at home. I find those quiet times vital to my creative life…and harder and harder to come by.

The problem with constantly filling our time with flashing screens and sounds is that creativity needs space. We need to hear ourselves somehow, as all that we’ve taken in and imagined merges and morphs into something new.

The big reason, of course, is the shiny little device accompanying me in the car and everywhere I go, which not only carries thousands of songs but can summon virtually any recorded music I want to hear. Or, if I don’t know what I want to hear, it will supply an infinite personalized playlist. 

Filling any silence with sound is so easy these days, as is filling any moment of down time with visual info—social feeds and news and videos and messages. We all do this all the time, without even thinking: Occupy the brief wait in the checkout line or in the hallway by scrolling through notifications, getting the latest updates about what someone we’ve never met had for lunch, or seeing a pic of another stranger’s legs on a beach somewhere.

The problem with constantly filling down time with flashing screens and sounds is that creativity needs space. We need to hear ourselves somehow, as all that we’ve taken in and imagined merges and morphs into something new. I honestly feel it’s harder than ever to tune into our own frequencies in this way now, because it’s so simple, tempting, and addicting to fill the space. 

I wonder sometimes how many ideas and schemes floating out there go unclaimed just because no one is paying attention.

So I leave my car stereo off on my drive, but my head is in fact full of sounds—songs I’m going to be playing at the gig, bits of what I hope will become songs, plus all the other chatter of everything on my mind. Often something crystallizes out of all this—maybe even a song. I actually have written two songs while parked at a specific rest area on Route 81 south in Pennsylvania, singing into my phone without an instrument, just thanks to the drive time between home and that spot, listening to my internal radio. (Read about one of those songs, “Here,” in this post.)

A little empty space, a little boredom, a little break from the entertainment that leaves us literally to our own devices—that is, ourselves. We need it.

—JPR

P.S. I wrote the song below, “Only the Soul,” back in 2008, when in retrospect our devices were far more limited and our digital addictions much weaker.

Only the Soul

Words and music by Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers

Lean a little closer
Let the signals fade
Dig a little deeper
In this life we’ve made
All the shiny little figures
Are dancing on a screen
Every finger is twitching
On a shiny new machine

Only the soul knows
Way down, way down

Easy little answers 
With the easy clicks
Easy little candy
For a midnight fix
All the shiny little wrappers 
Are lying in a heap
Still the hunger is calling 
And will not let me sleep

Only the soul knows
Way down, way down

Tell me what you picture
When the screen goes gray
Tell me what you think of
When there’s nothing to say
Feel the swaying of the rhythm
When the noises start to fade
Steal the tiny little secret
Lying in the cooling shade

Only the soul knows
Way down, way down