We Saw Brilliance...

You know, one thing I love about music is the way it can remind me of things.

Let me explain. There are some lines in songs that make me think of very specific times and situations.

For example, whenever I hear the very first lines of the Elliott Smith song "Everything Reminds Me of Her" -- “I never really had a problem because of leaving/But everything reminds me of her this evening" -- I’m transported back to a house party that I attended at my college one Friday night in the fall of 2002.

This party, I remember, was hopping, and I was actually having a pretty good time, but then my ex-girlfriend Keri showed up with a guy she had been dating before she met me, and seeing her with him again was so surreal and disturbing that I had to leave.

I never really had a problem because of leaving/But everything reminds me of her this evening.

I really love the line. It's so evocative for me. Every time I hear it -- boom -- that night, that situation.

Another piece of song text that really stands out and absolutely touches me is from Linkin Park.

The line comes from the band's 2017 song “One More Light,” which is about the tragedy of losing a person you love and how your loved one might just be one person to the world, but the world to you.

Anyway, there’s this line in the first verse, and it's great. Thinking back to times shared with the person who is now gone, Chester Bennington says that he and this person “saw brilliance when the world was asleep.”

I absolutely love this line. I love it because it makes me think of my old friend Andrew. Andrew was my best friend for about 15 years. He and I did so many crazy things together and had some of the most incredible laughs together. I really feel that he was my male soulmate. Anyway, this line from "One More Light" reminds me of one Saturday morning spent with Andrew in the summer of 1995.

What happened was, Andrew had slept over my house and had brought with him this, like, scary plastic mask. It was, like, a translucent clown mask -- a really creepy looking thing -- and we did something so crazy with it.

But before I tell you what, just know Andrew and I had stayed up all night that night. Don’t ask me what we did, but we stayed up all night. And then when it was about 6:30 or 7 a.m., we still weren't done.

What we did, actually, instead of going to sleep, was we took turns scaring passersby with the mask. Every time someone would walk by down below on the street, either Andrew or I would wear the mask and stick our head out the window of my room and scream, "Rah!" After the people would look up, Andrew or I would let the person get a good look at the awful mask and then duck back into my room. And laugh. And laugh and laugh.

Just the idea of someone jogging by or walking along on a nice summer morning and all of a sudden seeing someone in a clown mask sticking his head out the window going "Rah!" -- it was too much! Oh my God did we laugh.

But to tie it back to the Linkin Park line, “We saw brilliance when the world was asleep.” Well, mostly everyone on that Saturday morning was still sleeping -- it was, after all, super early. But Andrew and I were defying sleep and just having so much fun. We were in a sense seeing brilliance: the joy of boyhood. So the line makes sense: "We saw brilliance when the world was asleep."

 God, I love music.