A side effect of my refusal to subscribe to Spotify (I just buy albums on Bandcamp or used CDs) is that when someone sends me a song to listen to, I usually look it up on YouTube and end up watching the music video. Because of this, there are some songs or artists that I like more than I might have without the video because the video adds an additional layer of interpretation.

I think I had mentally blocked myself from verbalizing this thought before because of my background as a musician. I would like to think of myself as someone who values the music itself and whose opinion of a song isn’t swayed by the addition of a video track. After all, a music video is kind of like an advertisement for the song or artist, a reference rather than the thing itself.

But then, I should have realized my susceptibility to music videos sooner, because a big part of jazz school was learning how to watch jazz performances: Musicians on stage employ a wide vocabulary of visual and bodily cues to steer the ship while improvising.

And I went to a school whose music buildings were right next to the film school—I think they actually had a small scoring stage somewhere. Lots of my classmates did collaborations with film or animation students, but I went the other way, preferring to incorporate “analog” art like poetry and fiction into my music by setting texts to melodies. A missed opportunity.