Into the Unknown - The Panic At the Disco Version, Please

This has been quite the year, hasn't it? Of course, I am not currently saying anything that will not be true for any human being on this planet when I utter that particular platitude. This has been quite the year. 

One of my guilty pleasures is going to the movies. I call it a guilty pleasure because when you go to the movies, you cannot be multitasking. There is a responsibility to yourself and your fellow movie goers to sit and watch without reaching for your cell phone or to try to finish that chore while the movie is running. It is a bit silly to think of actually going to the movies as a guilty pleasure, but it is for me. It is something that I have not been able to do for a long time, and I miss it. I am longing for the day when my local movie theater opens up again, and I can go without wondering if I will be bringing germs to my clients after those hours in the presence of people outside my home-work cycle. Watching movies at home is not quite the same as going to the theater.

ANYWAY...

The reason I brought up all the movie stuff is that when I saw Frozen II, I had the luxury of watching it in a theater completely alone. This was pre-pandemic and was on a Tuesday evening in either late December or early January. I decided to go to the movies on a SCHOOL NIGHT! I am rarely out of my home after work - I go straight home to do home stuff and going to the movies just was strange to me. Benefits of Tuesday night movies? Not many people around! I enjoyed the movie, and some of the songs have become my anthems for this year.

My second favorite song from Frozen II is The Next Right Thing.

This song has been a mantra running in the back of my head in specific times lately, but it is not my power anthem.

My power anthem of the year happened at the end of the movie. I was sitting in my seat, getting my things together, and starting to walk down the aisles to move to the hallway (the folks at my theater can't start cleaning until everyone is gone, so I move into the hallway where they think I've left, and then I wait until the end of movies because everyone knows you DON'T LEAVE A PIXAR MOVIE UNTIL THE VERY END!), when Panic at the Disco started their rendition of Into the Unknown. I sank down into a seat and just reveled in the sheer power of that music. It was exhilarating!

Imagine this sound coming at you from a movie theater's surround sound system. It just sank into my bones.

This has been the year for moving into the unknown. Nothing has been what I expected. My word for 2020 was EVOLVE, and I had plans for all sorts of things that just stopped. I was ready to move into some new business ventures that were cancelled. I was going to travel to places near and far. I was going to move myself from where I was in January into a new house and into new opportunities. These things did not happen.

The song, Into the Unknown, was a good anthem for a year where I had to shepherd three interns through uncertainty, through nine schedule changes, through the virus, through life as a music therapist. I don't like not having answers to important questions, and this year was the year for questions!

This song acknowledges that fear of the unknown and asks for guidance. Perhaps that is why it has resonated so much with me. I wonder if it would have been as important to me if it had been released a year earlier. My interns know that this song energizes me, so they sneak it into dancing TMEs with our clients just to see me burst out of my office, singing! It reaches me in a way that Idina Menzel's version just doesn't. There is something so wonderful about the guitar at the beginning that just energizes my every atom and the rhythm, the tempo, the lyrics all come together in a way that just thrills me.

I emailed with my father's music therapist last week and told her some stuff about my family and music. One of the things that my Dad and I share is an attraction to specific songs but not to specific performers. For example, I don't know any of the other songs that Panic at the Disco performs, but I love this particular song. My Dad is like that as well. He loves specific songs but not all songs by the artists. My Dad is particular, like me, that he likes only specific versions of his favorite songs. He loves Dolly Parton's performance of I Will Always Love You, but only the one from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Do not even try the Whitney Houston version any where near him! It is almost sacrilege to cover another song (in his opinion).

As 2020 is coming to a close and the hope and promise of 2021 comes closer, I am going to be compiling my own playlist. This song, this version, will be on that playlist. I hope that it will always give me the thrill that I have now when I hear it - that jolt of energy that just takes over my nervous system in a way that is indescribable. I wonder if I can find that music in fake book notation...hmmm. Random tangents as I process the things stimulated in me after listening to the music video twice in a row. I think I may have to listen to music on my commute this morning - start formulating that playlist now.

Dear readers, I hope that you have a song like this one in your life - something that can distract and inspire you, thrill you to the bone, and keep you going when things are really rough. If so, would you share it? I am going to spend some time during this upcoming break compiling my own playlist to help me get through the holidays away from my family and friends and through this year into the unknown that is 2021.

Happy Solstice - go out and see Jupiter and Saturn tonight.