Music. Why do I do it? I won’t “play a happy song, pleeeeease” to placate a gaggle of starry-eyed girls. I won’t rock out just to make a crowd scream. Lately I haven’t even been performing in front of live audiences that much. Music just comes down to the way my voice and my guitar strumming makes me feel. It’s the world-stopping notion that I’m making something undeniably special.
What a miracle! It’s a cliché, I know, to say that writing a song is like giving birth to a child, and that a ...
Music. Why do I do it? I won’t “play a happy song, pleeeeease” to placate a gaggle of starry-eyed girls. I won’t rock out just to make a crowd scream. Lately I haven’t even been performing in front of live audiences that much. Music just comes down to the way my voice and my guitar strumming makes me feel. It’s the world-stopping notion that I’m making something undeniably special.
What a miracle! It’s a cliché, I know, to say that writing a song is like giving birth to a child, and that a person can’t understand what it’s about until they’ve written a song or had a baby. But it’s true. When I create, I enter the realm of pure feeling: “Ooh, I like that sound! Nice!” “What a chord progression!” “No way. I did not just sing that.” And I’m sweating my ideas into the atmosphere, overtaken by the pangs and pulses of a tidal wave of new melodies crashing down on me in mad harmony.
I don’t get to say out loud the things that my songs say in their lyrics or in their deliveries. My songs are not other people’s outlet, after all. They’re mine. I get to tell stories and travel into other people’s minds in my songs. I get to say, “I’m lonely. I’m imperfect. I’m not who you think I am. I’m angry about my father’s mistakes. Society is unfair. Sometimes I want to scream and be irrational. Sometimes I just want someone to listen!”
My songs are my finely crafted, inalienable progeny. They are my thoughts, my doubts, and my desires. They are melancholy and sarcastic. They are grim and morbid, or adamant and furious, or naïve and crushing. They are me. Is it any surprise that finally managing to force out my deepest, truest convictions sometimes brings me to tears? So I cry, and I believe that my tears slip into the continuum of my thoughts scrabbling into reality. These thoughts move people. They move me. Closer or farther away in space, it doesn’t matter. My music is my indelible mark on the world, my indelible mark on time. And so I can only ever move forward.
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