Interview:

The spiritual significance of music is unique to each person due to its subjective nature. As we listen, we’re offered our own interpretive experience and that’s what makes it such a powerful and high art form. I’ve always connected with the transcendent aspects of harmony and melody, and how they sometimes penetrate the soul or some wiser, more open aspect of myself, often touching my sore spots.

I remember being a child, hearing folk songs and particular classical pieces that my mother would play in our home and completely surrendering to the honesty and universal truth conveyed in some of those works. The sound ripped me open. The music often gave me permission to be vulnerable, to love and embrace the beauty of life’s simplest moments.

In my teen years, I discovered more extreme and experimental forms of music that helped purge some of my anger, pain, and frustration. Life was difficult and somehow music understood me and how I felt. The dissonance that was in those sounds, was in me too and provided yet another perspective into what felt like a painful, narrow world. As I grew into an adult child, I began volunteering my skills as a musician with people in hospitals and hospices who were suffering with illness and often dying. I saw then, how the language of music could say more than any word or even thought. Music can express itself from a place that is beyond the mind, and help deconstruct our stories of whom we think are into something more expansive, connected, and whole. I saw a natural wakefulness occur in people who weren’t able to let go. The music gave them permission to just be, without their story.

I learned how music could essentially heal us by returning us home and helping us realize our true nature. The mysterious and perhaps most valuable properties of music has often lead me to beg the question, who am I? So for me, music has been a mirror of absolute truth and what could be more spiritual than that?

“Music can express itself from a place that is beyond the mind, and help deconstruct our stories of whom we think are into something more expansive, connected, and whole.”
– Paul Masvidal, guitarist and vocalist in Cynic