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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“The greatest thing, you’ll ever learn Is just to love, and be loved in return.”
At a certain point, your life is more about your legacy to your kids than anything else.
Rooms are rooms, after all, as a music staff is a music staff. How you fill them is what makes them your own.
Music has long been a part of your death rituals. Requiem masses. Hymns. A bugler blowing “Taps.” As a talent, I cannot grieve. But you certainly grieve through me. Your most passionate compositions are often inspired by loss.
HAD THEY ALL LEFT THAT DAY, OUR STORY WOULD BE DIFFERENT. But then, had many of you left places even one day earlier, the landscape of your lives would be rearranged. You cannot unplay your notes. Time, like music, is indelible that way.
His time in El Maestro’s small flat above the laundry had been the closest Frankie ever came to my stark beauty, my melodic seduction. In drifting from that, he feared he’d drifted from El Maestro’s grace.
“What if you kept turning and turning?” “The string would snap. You cannot ask things to do what they are not meant to do, Francisco. Eventually, they will break.”
The key to learning music is humility, see?
Music is about communication, see? It’s about baring your soul in the notes, telling your tale. That’s how you play. I didn’t even know this guy, but from his music, the way he was bending those strings, I could tell he was hurt and was searching for something.
“Did you kill somebody?” Because that’s how it was shaping up to me. And he shook his head no, then he wrote, “But I was ready to.” I said, “That’s not the same thing.” And he tapped his heart, as if to say, “It is in here.” Later, I understood that. He was talking about intentions. That’s important in music, too. Critically important. What you’re thinking about can be what you become. Good and evil. But sitting with him, it seemed like he had done his time. Three years, man? For thinking about doing something bad?
He realized how many people it takes to keep one child alive in this world.
In life, as in music, there are measures to play and measures to rest.
Everyone joins a band in this life. Sometimes just to be brave.
Everyone joins a band in this life. Some of them break your heart.
“Memories are not in places, Papa. Memories are in your mind.
I am Music. And Music is in the connection of human souls, speaking a language that needs no words.
Everyone joins a band in this life. And what you play always affects someone. Sometimes, it affects the world.
