Carrying the Zero: How Songs Stick With Us.

The summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college was a critical time in my life looking back in retrospect. Most of what I had known about my life and had become acquainted to over its 19 years of existence on Earth had been upended through various events in my life and being home for the summer placed a permanent stamp of existence in reality for those events in my mind. It was strange, lucid, and hard to understand how I exactly felt. My parents were no longer together, my house was being sold, and I had become apathetic to relationships with those around me. In essence I was adrift in my own mind for the first time in my life, free of any attachment to the old. Everything was ending and everything was beginning at the same time. It is in these moments of utter nebulous existence that music can really etch a permanent existence of importance upon our own minds. The song 'Carry the Zero' by 90's Indie Rock masters Built to Spill did just that to my own mind not once, but three times over. As a result the song remains in my life one of the most permanent reminders of my own experiences and moments of hardship. The song is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, my favorite song of all time. Nothing can ever take away the personal attachment I have to the song despite everything else in my immediate context coming and going. 'Carry the Zero' is unchanging and potent every time I listen to it. Songs become important to us through experience, something a critic can never fully grasp due to the fact that the critical quality of a song becomes a moot point when you move into the realm of individual experience. The music becomes objective to someone's life rather than a subjective form of art that can be picked apart, looked into, and reviewed properly. Songs are important to us because they represent our feelings, moments in our lives, and our very existence in the moment so often. It is a beautiful thing.