Close your eyes and listen. Listen to the beat pounding through you sending chills down your entire body. Listen to the words whispering truths into your ears that travels to your heart and straight into your soul. Your body is alive with this blissful feeling that only music can give you. Music can change everything about you whether it comes from a stage that makes an entire audience feel alive or from a small phone that you listen to alone in a little bubble of peace. Music is and always will be a gateway from the real world.

Concerts are easily one of the best places to escape. At a concert, all fears and troubles melt away. For that one moment, you’re whole again and the spark inside you is lit again. The broken world we live in just seems to make sense and you no longer feel alone. The entire atmosphere of concerts has such an euphoric feeling that makes people never want to leave.

“When I go to a concert it feels like I’m not on earth anymore,” Daisy Marie Rodriguez said. “I feel as if I’m in a different dimension with other people who are going through the same stuff and understand one another as if we were all family.”

Most artists that create and perform these songs for the world to hear do it not just for the fame and money, but for the release of emotions and endless memories that were trapped in their body screaming to get out. Some artists want to share these feelings and adventures because they believe that it could relate to others out there and maybe make someone feel as if for once they are not alone in the world. Other artists share these intimate words so that they can release some of the pain from their mind. It’s an outlet like no other.

“It’s a way to express yourself without openly offending people. They can share their feelings in a way that no one else has the ability to do and they can connect with others,” Paige Mittendorf said.

The music these artists create unknowingly become a part of their fans in such a way that makes each person associate the songs with a moment in time of their life. The music and the people are now intertwined, a playlist of memories that with one push of a button can unleash a wave of old memories for better or worse.

“Music is my soul. I have certain songs for every mood. It has a way of expressing things when I can’t think of the right words,” Chenay Grimaldo explained.

Through music, many people have been able to tell a person how they’re feeling without having to whisper a single word. Music has the uncanny way of being able to influence your mood. With one song it can make a person double over in pain with soundless sobs, or it can make a person breakout into a solo dance party in their bedroom that has their entire family wondering where you got your horrible dance moves from.

“There’s different types of songs that shape your mood creating different feelings and emotions that can make you feel completely different,” Angela Garza said. “Music is an experience if you pick the right one you’ll feel whatever it makes you feel.”

In the show, One Tree Hill, Peyton Sawyer had a theory that there are two types of people in the world: lyric people and music people. Lyric people tends to be more analytical focusing on the meaning of a song. They’re the ones pouring over the lyrics of a new song interpreting the heck out of everything. The music people, though, could care less for the lyrics as long as the song has a good beat and you can dance to it. Either way, though, things tend to find you when you need it the most no matter what kind of music lover you are. More often, though, that thing is usually song lyrics.

We all have our own soundtracks. We just need to take the time to listen.

As Peyton Sawyer once said, “Every song ends but is that any reason not to enjoy the music?”