Noise F.M// William Card

Being the Noise Editor for the Sentry has been a story of the duality between impulse and hesitation, feeling shook and inspired. Merge those experiences and you’ll find something in yourself you never knew was there.

“When it comes to making pop music,” Lorde said in a recent interview with the NY Times Magazine, “it’s a mess until the moment it’s clean.” Since this year’s first issue, I’ve treaded through the thick jargon, relentless timetables, and inflated personalities surfacing once-a-week to deliver a music section to the CU Denver community. Forces in my control brought me a sense of comfort that helped me create and manage this section from week to week.

Forces out of my control brought me to a very different place. While I still managed to create a section for every issue, I didn’t anticipate the weekly struggle of deciding what to cover. Great music happens all around us all the time. Yet, not all music speaks to everyone. (In a more recent reference, I guess not everyone is in the mood to jam to “Chicken Fried,” by Zac Brown Band.)

Just like pulling the trigger on a topic for a term paper, I developed an additional sense that informed me of what music to pick on a weekly basis. Yeah, it totally failed a handful of times—e.g. completing an entire preview interview and article before the show was inevitably cancelled—and I thought some of the music was pretty bad, but I learned a valuable lesson. If the music has a story, it will speak loud and clear for itself. It’ll bug you, find you at your best and worse moments, and in the words of Lorde from the same interview, “it lets you feel something you didn’t know you needed to feel.”

It surges as a feeling that you sometimes can’t explain, and when the moment presents itself, it provides a moment of clarity in a time full of darkness.

Yes, I’m sad to leave. But what won’t leave me is the compelling stories of music and love that I learned to capture while at the Sentry.

Let the music feel you up. Those sensations feed into greater senses of self. A self we didn’t know we had.