How Do I Keep The Music Playing?

Media Person: Shauna-Marie Henry

Unarchiving that song was the best thing I have ever accidentally done. It is called “How Do You Keep The Music Playing” by Patti Austin and James Ingram.

My tired heart still throbs quietly each time I listen. As a musician and person who is deeply in love, the question remains. In love, you are required to make the relationship over — to subvert expectations and keep the torch ablaze despite your person being both different and the same in the strangest way.

“The more I love, the more that I’m afraid.” The more I give to my craft, the more I feel I am less of myself. At times, I listen back to a recording of my vocals, and I do not know who I am listening to. And it is in the strangeness of my maturing voice that I experience the best of me.

Perhaps it is in the letting go that we get the best of ourselves. In the unexpected, I give the best of me. When he surprises me with flowers whilst I am struggling with the lows of life. When a joke is said unexpectedly during a disagreement. When I do not concern myself with which way my hair falls, and he is overwhelmed by my beauty regardless.

“How Do You Keep The Music Playing” seems to grapple with the innermost universal thoughts on love. How do I be a friend and lover? How do I seize the moment amidst the monotony of knowing a person too well? How do we let ourselves go the distance when [we] know that even music ends?

The truth is, I am overinvolved in my voice. I think about it far too often. I am flooded with panic each time it crackles and breaks, and months down the line, I am on the floor of my bedroom just listening.

I punish myself for the needless worry. Unfortunately, it really is so simple. That when something works, it works, and all the rumination in the world can’t shoo that away.

I need not know how I came to feel this way when I feel two strong arms around my waist at night. I could care less which strand of hair he touched and why. I don’t need to know how much salt is in my eye when I miss him and God, sometimes I miss him so much.

So, the sentence is no longer, how do I keep the music playing, but rather — the music plays on a record, leave it be.

“If we can try with every day to make it better as it goes With any luck than I suppose The music never ends”

— How Do You Keep The Music Playing

Patti Austin, James Ingram