When I was growing up my dad loved music. I would wake up on a Saturday morning to the sound of the Beatles or Queen playing downstairs, the smell of a fry up wafting up from the kitchen. I remember a John Fogerty phase where I must have heard Centerfield every day for a month. ELO consumed weeks of our lives as we sat next to the huge stereo in the living room listening to Jeff Lynn's magical creations, trying to pick out the most unusual instruments and sounds.

As time went on, the music played less and less. My dad got sick, and trips to the hospital to visit him took over from our lazy family weekends. He got better over several years, but things had changed. When I left home around that time, the markets crashed almost to the day I started college. I would visit him and find him glued to the nightly news, trying to work out what had happened.

Whenever I stopped by after that, the house would be quiet. Maybe if there were visitors he'd put some background music on, Tom Waits or Norah Jones, or something like that. But never for the sheer joy of it, so loud you could hear it on the street outside.

I think we've all felt this thing, this change that is more than money, more than "the economy", whatever that means. It's a change within ourselves and our loved ones, where the inner light within each of us has been dimmed simultaneously, so abruptly that it often seems like we were always this way. Like there was never any music at all.

When I was much younger, before this all started, my dad used to love telling me stories about Buddy Holly. As a high school student, Buddy would sit in his car in the dark Texas plains with the radio on, listening to his heroes play concerts in far off places, on stations only available when the local channels had shut down for the night.

I now know how Buddy felt when he looked up at the Lubbock night sky and dreamed of something greater. I know how my dad felt when he would wake up early on his only day off just to listen to Peggy Sue one more time.

I can feel it now, for the first time in a long time, the crackling uncertainty giving way to a pure signal. I can feel hearts opening and minds racing with excitement, and see night skies filled not with darkness but the starlight of possibilities.

Sometimes when I visit my dad we talk about Bitcoin, and I can see the hope shining in his eyes. I like to think that when I leave to drive home, he turns the music on again.