The Sound of Music

Music plays a big role in my life.

My home stereo and car radio blast my favorite CDs or iTunes playlists virtually around the clock: when I wake up, on my way to work, at work, on the way home, and when I go to sleep.

I have a hard time imagining life without music. And I don’t like what I see when I actually DO imagine it. In the words of Autograph, the “Turn Up the Radio” one-hit wonder: “The only time I turn it down / Is when I’m sleepin' it off.”

But even my near obsession pales in comparison to some the wise-asses in Scotland, who have literally taken their love of song to new heights.

According to USA Today online, authorities last month discovered a nearly intact piano on top of Britain’s tallest peak, Ben Nevis. Best they can tell, some climbers scaled the 4,000-foot peak with the piano and left the unbroken cast iron frame and functioning strings behind.

Mystery solved, if you’re looking for the “easy” answer. But perhaps, just perhaps, the culprits are NOT mountain climbers with a love of the ivories and good exercise.

I have another theory. What if a race of super-beings, some musical geniuses from another planet, use tricks like pianos on mountains to lead us to a new level of auditory consciousness?

Picture the musical version of the mysterious obelisks in the book/film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Instruments are so limited in studios, concert halls, and homes … is it so hard to believe that some rockin’ E.T.’s are paving the way to the next big thing in melody and harmony?

I’m starting to convince myself that this theory has some merit.

I think they’ve done this all along. Throughout history, aliens have probably lent helping hands to chosen artists to advance the musical evolution of our species.

I have the facts to back this up, people.

Led Zeppelin, of course, made that trek to the Himalayas, receiving musical revelation from the stars on a wind-swept peak … leading to “Kashmir.”

It’s clear that extraterrestrials descended from the skies to deliver a drum kit to Phil Collins, inspiring his classic tune “In the Air Tonight.”

Naysayers can no longer deny that the Beatles found a hidden alien underwater craft in the Mariana Trench during a side trip from their Japanese tour in the mid-60s. How else could these four Liverpudlians come up with something as ridiculous as “Yellow Submarine?”

And it’s a little known fact that Eddie Van Halen has frequently received aid from The Others.

He found a carefully placed electric guitar atop Italy’s lava-spurting Mt. Etna in the mid-1970s; the other-worldly object prompted him to play the “Eruption” solo on Van Halen I. Not to mention those smokin’ techniques that aliens passed to him during his vacation to Central America’s famous canal zone.

You know, the one in Panama.