The legacy of the musician is swaddled in the indelible melodies that they leave behind like comet trails that loop and swoop around our hearts like childhood kites.
They are attached to our innermost longing which is the secret harmonic signature of who we really are.
Sometimes the only musical accompaniment that I require is silence.
That is when my feelings dress up in the crisp formal attire of the orchestra tuxedo and the things I cannot hear become the feelings that I need to conduct.
And yet despite all my preparation and life rehearsing, it can all fall apart and becomes clangorous and dissident and that is when tears come to the rescue to wash away the emotional collision and allows me to start again in search of a my next spontaneous rhapsody.
It all begins with Disney I suppose when we become forever charmed by Mary Poppins and all the make-believe citizens of the animation world who somehow know the precise musical prescription that can be called up the minute that loneliness or fear or both crash the party.
Music is our most durable invisible life shield that protects us just like mommy and daddy once did whenever lightning bared its electric teeth or thunder roared like a ferocious invisible predator.
This year we have lost a steady death march of musicians who spent their lives balancing on the edge only to find themselves falling off them at way too early of an age.
And yet their music remains, perfectly intact, right where it belongs: in the rhythm and blues section of our hearts filed under the word, "love."
Once we hear a certain song it somehow manages to recalibrate our entire circulatory system and just like that we are in total communion and communication with the essence of who we really are and to whatever powerful elements outside of us we need to connect to.
Although our music heroes are physically gone, their songs remains the same.
Glenn Frey whose only intimacy shared with me was via the illusion of celebrity, is alive and well in the belly of my tune filled incubator where I quietly nurture my most loving melodic newborns.
With eyes closed, I can still hear his Eagle clear voice soar which is not an incredible simulation, but rather a living, breathing thing no less credible or dynamic as Mary Poppins or Ariel or Belle.
They are all a part of my mobile chorus, ready to burst into song on demand.
Their songs, along with thousands of others are the go to lullabies that I can turn to when the sun suddenly turns cold and I find myself feeling abandoned, shaking and cold, in the fairy tale witch filled forest of darkness and despair.
Bowie is in the incubator. So are Merle Haggard, Ralph Stanley, Prince, Maurice White and Paul Kantner and so many other minstrels who have come and gone in a stunning crescendo whose final notes have hammered my most malleable and sound sensitive soul.
I remember, when I was a teenager, waiting like Odysseus's wife on the tumbling shores of anticipation, for my favorite song to arrive via the electronic ship, WABC. And once it sounded it's presence, I remember feeling cherished and deeply understood and most of all rescued.
My songs are my own personal spoon river anthology ghosts who can rise or rest, ever ready to invite me to offer me the luxurious bounty of music.
I often think of music as a kind of immediate express time travel machine that not only guides me to the specific time and place of the composer or performer, but to the time and place where I was first touched by that piece, just like crater like impact of first love.
Anyone who knows me knows that music, for me, begins and ends with The Beatles for many, many reasons. I recently returned from The Beatles Pilgrimage Tour of Liverpool and London where I traced their footsteps from birth to Abbey Road.
What I got in return was the gift of the profoundly ordinary.
To my surprise and delight what I was left with was the keen awareness that growing up the "boys" were nothing more than simple, everyday people who managed, by luck and extraordinary circumstance, to achieve the most fantastic dizzying levels of success.
The combustible chemistry of their times and of each other were the never to be repeated again ingredients of the most magical form of magic.
The idea of destiny always seems to arrive in the backseat of hindsight.
Their music, to me, is their own personal, still living diary which includes poetic passages that are full of love, agony, freedom, profound loss and the pure exhilaration that comes from a life fully and rarely, if ever, lived.
It is also the distillation of every single note that thrilled them while growing up.
When I write, certain classical pieces create a kind of immediate transcendent soundtrack that not only inspire me, but make me feel less alone. The intention and invention of the composer resonates and I feel like his or her sole and exclusive partner.
When I'm not writing, sometimes the long distance tribal murmur of the often solemn grown up chat voices of NPR make me feel like I'm eavesdropping on a conversation that I may or may not even want to be a part of but it's nice to know that my electronic neighbors are right there.
The same goes for the sound of TVs in another room. They feel tribal too. Like all the customs of everyday life are being ritualistically performed whether I'm a part of them or not.
In the end, nothing is better than just the right music, whose Spotify or Pandora source I have to carefully dial into, like a Dolly Levi matchmaker, in search of the perfect suitor for my elusive and ever changing, and at time overly sensitive and reactive feelings du jour.
The body electric indeed.