Art that vibrates at your frequency

I have been listening to David Bowie's Modern Love on repeat for basically all of 2026 so far. Someone I know posted a live version on Instagram or somewhere around the end of the year and while of course I had heard it many times before, it struck me anew this go-around.

I love Bowie. I was a Labyrinth child, a stealing-my-dad's-old-records teenager. I had spent the whole weekend before he died listening to Blackstar and discovered when I heard about his death that I hadn't really considered him a regular human subject to the same mortality as the rest of us.

I have a tendency to get fixated on a single song for days or weeks (or sometimes even months - hello, Beirut's My Night with the Prostitute from Marseilles, the song that is maybe the only reason I managed to write my first Master's thesis) at a time and just listen to it over and over and over and over. This does not end, as you might think, with me never wanting to hear the song again, but rather with a mellowing of the obsession that allows the song in question to subside in focus and become part of my regular general playlist.

There are people who are much more musically savvy and/or intense than I am so I am sure this phenomenon is not just reserved to me, but sometimes a song, or even just a line, a section, a certain progression of notes will evoke a sort of somatic response from me, a feeling so powerful that it becomes physical, and that tends to be what triggers this kind of obsessive listen.

In this case, while I'm enjoying the whole song, it really comes down to two different series of notes. First the melody of "Gets me to the church on time" and "Puts my trust in God and man," and especially, especially the melody of "I'm standing in the wind" and "I'm lying in the rain." Those two lines each take about two seconds of the song and it feels like butterflies in the stomach, like my bones are vibrating, like God or the universe is reaching into my brain and lighting it up, like my soul is tingling until I could cry.

I get that same feeling with certain works of art. The peace, the joy, the emotion, twisting the dial until the signal comes into focus, the tuning fork keying into that spot of connection with something deep and wide and beautiful, where I can't stop staring at it. I felt it the first time I saw Starry Night in person and never made it past that spot in the museum for the rest of the day. I felt it when the MFA had a Rothko exhibit one year when I was working just down the street and I ended up going there and picking one painting to stare at for each of my lunch breaks as long as the exhibit was there. And I've felt it with just as many pieces by less famous artists too. I buy myself a piece of original art for my birthday every year, and those are the ones I buy, those pieces I just can't stop looking at, that give me that feeling. A $25 watercolor, a $100 acrylic painting, a $50 photograph, a $1000 oil painting, all can do the same thing.

It's related but not exactly identical to the feeling when I'm writing or making art that I've gotten it right. I might re-write the same sentence, adjust the line of a drawing, play with the color in a watercolor, fiddle with the layers in a collage, ten times without being able to tell you what I'm looking for. I just know it feels off, until it doesn't, and that right feeling is not dissimilar to what I'm talking about here.

Anyway, I realized today is ten years since Bowie inexplicably passed so why not be fixated on one of his songs right now? Why not take a moment in all the ugliness pushing in every day to thank god or chance or the universe for art, for deeply human, messy, idiosyncratic creativity, for the creations, made or received, that come into perfect tune, and to marvel at the breadth, that we all vibrate at different frequencies and there is something out there to match each one?

*The header image is not especially related, just there for visual interest. It's from a set of watercolorable drawings I made for my nieces.