How to Know When You Have Found Art - Fiona Apple

I once had a Professor in college who told me that he remembered the time when he first heard the Beatle's Sargent Pepper album when it was played at a party that he was at. 

Music was playing, people were dancing, and the music set the background tone. Then someone put on the Sargent Pepper album, and the dancing literally stopped. 

People sat down, got very quiet, and listened to the lyrics and music and the sounds of the album.

No one had heard anything like that before.

I play music constantly, and my headphones are often on my head as I work, and today I learned how to know when you are in the presence of art.

I was listening to the new Fiona Apple album called;

The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do.

I was working and very focused and then slowly the album moved from the background in my mind to the front, and I started listening intently to the lyrics.

I had to sit down and really listen to the words, so I stopped working and listened.

I got up to find the case, i had to find the case, to get the booklet with the lyrics, and I looked at each of the lyrics and read the individual lines, and then studied the drawings, and then listened again harder to the phrasing, to the slant rhymes, and the interesting word choices.

I stopped what I was doing and just listened to the whole album. The whole world stopped.

When done, I then had to tell someone, so I wrote this.

That is art.

D