Long Way Gone Read Online Free PDF

Something?”
    “Anything you want.”
    Without warming up or making some show of apology, she opened her mouth and poured out a sultry, silky Dusty Springfield tune about Billy Ray being a preacher’s son. I nearly melted on the bench.
    I’ve always had a soft spot for the preacher’s kid. She knew that. I knew she knew that. And she knew I knew she knew. Which made it that much more fun.
    In two seconds I was twenty years younger. The pitch was so perfect and tone so true I almost didn’t touch the strings for fear of blurring her beautiful sound. The words rolled off her tongue with a rhythm and cadence pushed by a voice that held a sense of longing. While powerful, it contained a disarming vulnerability. When we were talking, Daley’s walls were jagged and Jericho high. Impenetrable. But the moment she opened her mouth and the first note rang out, the gates flung wide. Proving that the music in her was DNA-deep. As much a part of her as her sea-blue eyes. And the only clear window through which she viewed, and understood, the world.
    She paused at the end of a line and smiled. “You gonna play or just sit there looking dumb and wonder-struck?” When she sang the part about Billy Ray being the only one to ever reach her, she glanced at me.
    Causing me to wonder if she was just singing a song, or talking about us.

5
    D escribing music is tricky. I’m not convinced that you can describe it like, say, a painting or a novel. While those are both experiences that produce feelings, they do so through the window of the eyes. The image we see—either images or words on a page—enters our eyes, travels through our intellect, where we make some sort of sense of it, and then routes through our emotions. The process is one of intellect and understanding first, emotions and feelings second.
    In my experience, music doesn’t work that way. Music enters us through the ears, where it makes a beeline to the grid of our emotions. Then it routes through to our intellect where we might “make some sense” of it. Music is felt on one level, and understood or processed on another. This doesn’t mean you can’t use your intellect to describe it . . . but I question whether the words we use can really do the job. It’s like describing the smell of the number 9.
    Music is meant to be experienced, not described.
    Music has its own language, shared by musicians, and it is just as real a language as Greek or Latin and, if you’re new to it, just as complicated. The key to deciphering the language of music is do-re-mi. And yes, it really is Rodgers-and-Hammerstein simple.
    For you nonmusical people, this do-re-mi stuff is called “scales.”
    Scales are the building blocks. The inherent order in music. They are as real as gravity and are hardwired into our DNA. Like preloaded topographical maps. Proof of that hardwiring is seen in our ability to know where a song is going musically the first time we hear it. For a singer or musician, the challenge comes in getting their fingers and hands and voice to make the corresponding sounds. So here is point number two. To really play music, or speak the language, one thing is required. And for it there is no substitute.
    Practice.
    People can cheat their way to the top in a lot of areas of life. They can steal, bribe, kill the competition, or take steroids to make them stronger and faster. But with music there’s no shortcut.
    Period.
    Fake it and people will throw tomatoes. Listeners can spot a fraud a mile away. That’s why standing on a stage or singing on a sidewalk can be such a gutsy proposition. It’s why lip-syncers are stripped of their awards and then drawn and quartered on the city gates. Despite this age of tolerance, we will not tolerate a fraud onstage. We value music and we value performance and we expect those who play or sing to do the same.
    My ear had always been pretty good. I was one of those folks born with a propensity. My dad used to say that I sang before I talked.