Dawn breaks, and Patrick Park's ‘Life is a Song’ begins to play.

As my dreams fade and the blackness lifts from my mind…and before i've even opened my eyes...i get the lyrics.

It’s from the season finale of ‘The O.C’. It’s more than amazing.
I can’t help but listen to it when I wake up, and it's because it's beautiful. Because it's poetry. And because it carries me through whatever comes next.

The day begins.

Driving to school, ‘Hummer’ by Foals drowns out brotherly noise; anything that’s directed past me is oh-so-cleverly averted. It's like a shield, my kind of super powered force field, and the volume is a mute button. My foot drums the metal frame, and it's suddenly bargain therapy.

House Meetings require a soundtrack of Battles, the ending of 'Atlas' a definite sepia toner...giving the bleak world just that little bit of picture postcard kitsch.

Throughout the day, my white earphones rarely leave my skull. And innocently, when i refuse to remove them, you ask 'what's music to you?'.

I reply calmly.
A safety blanket? A best friend?

An addiction?

Can music be all of these things, and more?

It distracts you, they say, it’s not exactly helpful. But how could we survive, without soundtracks to our lives?

Oh my darling, i say, before I fall into the sleep that I’m promised every night, I need to hear ‘World Spins Madly On’ by the Weepies, or the release doesn’t come. It’s like a medication. It's like your skunks and garden weeds.

Just songs, just bands, just melodies – how can music be better than reality?

The thing, the thing that people don’t understand, is that for most of us…
it is.

It’s like having a world inside your pocket, a world you can create and remix, search for. A world you can control, but a world that’s constantly changing. Although, at the same time, you can go back to its past. And somehow, it’s past is totally your own.

It’s a world that other people can share, but it’s so unbelievably private that you sometimes feel that sharing…could ruin it. You want to keep the incredible ones for yourself, because if anyone ever listened to them and didn’t appreciate them, it would be murder. Cold blooded murder of the English tongue.

It’s selfish, self obsessive, and decadent. It’s blocking out a world that should be interacted with, not forgotten and covered over with riffs and hooks and synthetic lyrics. It’s a crime.

But it’s us.

It’s the way we live, because without it, without someone else’s voice putting rhyming words into our ears as we walk, we wouldn’t be able to move.

A safety blanket? Yes. A best friend? Not exactly.

Because we need human contact, we need conversations and hugs and emotion – it just so happens that the other person may have one earphone plugged in too.

So if you see a group of people, screaming as the exchange pen drives of craved for singles, don’t judge them. If you see them sitting silently in a circle…seemingly not communicating, fuelling the idea that the youth of the day are more preoccupied with technology than each other, ask what they’re listening to.

You may find we’re more addicted than you think.

And you may just be surprised.