Interview:

I believe that when music really touches you, it touches a spiritual core. The realities of daily life take us away from spirituality. Practical necessities like earning a living, keeping our homes in some sort of order, and so on, can divorce us from soul-consciousness. The most effective way of getting back to a state of soul-consciousness is meditation, but in place of that, the non-verbal communication of music can also have a spiritual significance. This works for different people in different ways. A lot of ancient music, from Indian devotional to traditional English folk, uses the drone as a way of reminding us of the eternal nature of the soul: a single note produced by a tampura or dulcimer played underneath a melody is rather like the spiritual core of a person that cannot be created or destroyed, and remains throughout the chaos and ever-changing situations of a lifetime. But the earbleeding noise of a Heavy Metal concert can also give someone the opportunity to transcend their material reality. Ultimately, I would say that we like music because we are spiritual beings. Music is tied up with identity, self-image, aspiration, taste, and self worth, but music’s true value lies in its ability to remind us that the one thing that really matters in life is the existence of the soul.

“When music really touches you, it touches a spiritual core… We like music because we are spiritual beings.”
– Will Hodgkinson, author of “Song Man: A Melodic Adventure, Or, My Single-Minded Approach To Songwriting”