The Music That Waited by Dan McGraw

“Most people go to their grave with their music still inside them.”

— Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

That line has followed me for years.

I can’t recall where I first heard it. Maybe in a book, maybe on the back of a coffee mug masquerading as a guru. But it lodged itself in me. Not as a command, but a quiet suggestion. A whisper that waited for its time. The way music does.

I’ve always loved music. But not in the way most people say they do. I didn’t paste posters on my wall or memorize tracklists. I didn’t chase fandom. It wasn’t about obsession. It was instinct. Primal, even.

One of my earliest memories is of reaching up toward a piano. I was too small to sit on the bench, barely tall enough to see the keys. There were no lessons, no goals. Just my fingers wandering the notes like a child dragging a stick through a puddle. No rules. No right way. Just sound. Curious, chaotic, joyful sound.

It didn’t matter that it wasn’t a song. What mattered was that something inside me recognized something outside me. I wouldn’t have had language for that then, but now I’d say I wasn’t trying to make music. I was trying to remember it. I was two.

I never stopped loving music, but I did start drifting from that wordless place.

When I was eleven, I joined the school orchestra. Not out of ambition. There was a girl. Jennifer. I was in fifth-grade love—the kind that doesn’t require logic. She joined the orchestra, so I followed. Before long, I was carrying a violin case onto the bus like I knew what I was doing.

One afternoon during practice, the instructor asked me to play a C. Then a G. He paused, gave me a look like he’d just spotted a unicorn eating a grilled cheese, and said, “You have perfect pitch.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but I understood that it meant something. I also understood Jennifer had heard it.

And so, music became not just sound, but identity.

I wasn’t bad at the violin, actually. But by junior high, everything had shifted. Jennifer moved to Seattle. I was rerouted to a different school, one where even the kids across the street didn’t go. The connection frayed. I gave it up.

Instead, I started listening more carefully—to artists who weren’t just playing notes, but sneaking secret messages into their lyrics. Bowie. The Police. Rush. The Doors. Their songs were riddles wrapped in rhythm. I didn’t always understand them, but I recognized the tone. They were telling the truth, even if I couldn’t quite translate it.

Around that time, another kind of music entered my life. Not through headphones. Through history.

My grandfather had played saxophone and clarinet in the big band era. He’d danced to Glenn Miller and watched Count Basie in person. Decades later, we’d sit together and let those recordings pour over us like warm light through a dusty window.

Those moments were quiet, almost reverent. Like some kind of inheritance was being passed without anyone saying so. Something about those brassy tones felt familiar. Felt like home.

Home itself was… less harmonious. School was a struggle. Homework was noise. I wasn’t a strong reader, but I had an uncanny memory—visual, auditory. Like a built-in movie projector. I memorized what I saw, what I heard. It got me through.

By seventh grade, I’d traded in my violin for swimming trunks. Two thousand yards a day in freezing water. But I was good, and being good meant being liked. Or at least noticed.

Before swim meets, the older kids would blast rock anthems—AC/DC or Black Sabbath, anything with chest-thumping drums and distorted guitar riffs. I went the other way. I’d put on Superman. John Williams. Music that didn’t just fire me up—it lifted me somewhere else.

As I stood on the deck, breathing chlorine and silence, that score filled my head and made everything feel mythic. The stopwatch became a villain. The lane was a gauntlet. I wasn’t swimming. I was flying.

I went undefeated that year in backstroke. Set a record. Beat the fifth-ranked swimmer in the state. But due to some bizarre eligibility rule, I couldn’t be ranked. I remember being disappointed. Then I remember not caring. Superman didn’t swim for medals.

He showed up, did what he came to do, and vanished into the sky—carried by trumpeting brass.

That’s what music became over the years. Not a performance. Not a pastime. A language my soul already knew, even if my mind hadn’t caught up.

My mother sang in our local church’s Chancel Choir, leading the pastoral procession in robin’s-egg-blue robes accompanied by a thunderous Wurlitzer pipe organ. She was a soloist then. At seventy-nine, she still is. Her voice is ridiculous in the best way.

I joined the junior choir. We wore white robes. I assume they symbolized innocence. That certainly didn’t protect me. Some of the older boys didn’t like that I sang or appeared angelic. Blazers can hide bullies.

After service, I’d go from hymnals to haymakers. Sunday brunch sometimes came with a side of bruises.

In high school, I auditioned for “Guys and Dolls.” I wasn’t planning to sing. I wanted to act. But the director had radar. She heard something in my voice and asked, “What do you have sixth period?”

“Western Civ,” I said.

She blinked, picked up the phone, called my counselor, and said a few words I couldn’t hear.

“You’re in Jazz Chorus now,” she told me. Just like that.

No discussion. No warning.

I hadn’t been looking for music. But music had been looking for me.

I sang all the time. In the car. In the shower. Between decisions and doubts. It was the one thing I could always reach for. No case. No plug. Just a voice.

My voice.

Karaoke became a sort of ritual. While I’d like to say I did it just for fun, part of me was probably trying to impress. But I was also watching. Watching people shed something. For three minutes, a person could become a rock god or a Motown legend. That’s the thing about music—it gives us permission we didn’t know we needed.

Still, one thing always eluded me.

Harmonies.

That intuitive ability to know and sing blues scales or the notes in chords all in real time.

I could sense it—like hearing someone behind you in the fog. But I couldn’t find it. My voice had just been the lead. It could solo. But it couldn’t disappear and sync into the group.

And that was the problem. I didn’t know why things felt off key.

I memorized bass lines in chorus and choir in dozens of songs. But like a soundtrack I relied upon, it was forced. But riffing under a melody? I was stuck. It wasn’t a technique issue. It was something deeper.

Years passed. I adapted. I performed. I buried. I learned how to get through. Pain became choreography. Resentment was the beat. I danced through marriage, through work, through habits I thought I could manage. I thought it was working. But it wasn’t. Everyone knew what I was doing except me.

About fifteen years ago, I walked into a music store with my brother and my son.

My brother always had a guitar slung over his shoulder with the swagger of someone who always belonged onstage. My son, still in high school, had rhythm in his bones. He didn’t question it. He just had it. He was free.

I wanted in. Not as a parent. Not as a performer. As someone who simply wanted to be part of the music.

So I picked up a bass guitar.

It felt like the right fit. Unflashy. Steady. The kind of instrument that holds things together quietly.

But when I plugged it in, nothing happened. Not externally. Internally.

It didn’t speak my language. It grumbled like someone who wanted to be left alone.

Meanwhile, my son picked up the guitar and was playing in church within a month.

I couldn’t get past Smoke on the Water, which is apparently the most banned riff in all of music retail. Trust me on this if nothing else.

So I gave up. Quietly. No tantrum. No drama.

I sold the bass for thirty bucks at a pawn shop in Ohio. Just enough to get gas to continue the chase for whatever pot of gold I would stumble upon.

But something gnawed at me. A silence. A grief. I had music inside me. I just didn’t know how to get it out.

Eventually, after years of performing my way through life, I did something different.

I started to forgive.

Not the kind of forgiveness that gets likes on Instagram. Not a TED Talk. A slow, gritty excavation. Shoveling out rooms I didn’t know I’d boarded up.

I forgave everything. Everyone. Even me.

And that’s when I heard it.

Harmony.

Not in my ears. In my chest. My ribs. My throat. I could feel where my voice belonged.

Even the harmonica started to make sense. It didn’t sound like a joke anymore. It had texture. Soul. Sadness with a wink. Which was a surprise, considering I’d owned a handful over the years and never managed more than a panicked squeal. But now, without trying to control it, the sound arrived differently. Less noise, more message.

And then, this past February, something nudged me. I found myself holding a beautiful Fender bass. This time, I wasn’t trying to be good. I wasn’t trying to impress anyone. I wasn’t trying at all. I just let go.

And this time, I could play.

I’m not claiming to be some master. I’m no Flea or Geddy Lee. But I could feel the songs. I could lock into progressions that once felt impossible. To my own amazement I could play along with nearly any song. I showed my friends, who thought I already knew how to play.

I started taking lessons, mostly out of curiosity. Within eight weeks, I was playing blues, rock, even some country with an intuitive understanding that would’ve stunned my younger self.

So what changed?

There’s a moment on the spiritual path when the metaphors stop. They land in your breath. Your hands. Your heartbeat.

We live in loops within loops. Patterns repeat until awareness interrupts. I had broken a loop.

I began to play with intention instead of reaction. To create not from control or fear, but from something shaped by love and presence. The bass became a symbol of that shift.

Most of us live like strings, waiting to be played. Reacting to circumstances, bending to external vibrations, trying to match a score we didn’t write.

The string has no say in the song.

But the player does.

And when I finally picked up that bass again, I wasn’t the string anymore.

I was the one playing.

That’s the heart of it. The bass player doesn’t wait for the string to be perfect. Playing it well is what brings it into tune.

That’s the quiet power of love in action. Of knowing your place in the band.

Your song isn’t out there.

It’s still inside you.

And maybe now is the time to listen.

Maybe it’s time to jam.

Check out more of Dan McGraw's spiritual storytelling and cosmic humor at: https://iniversepleasehold.substack.com