In this series of lectures I want to provide an overview of the field of light-quark meson spectroscopy. What do we understand about mesons? What does studying mesons tell us about QCD? How do we study mesons? Why do we study mesons; what is exciting about this? The area of light-quark meson spectroscopy deals with mesons built up from u, d, and s quarks. Typically, these systems have masses below 2.5GeV/c2.