Music Love

If you followed my blog before you already know how much I love music. There is something absolutely magic about the way that music can lift the spirit and put you in the best mood. I find it to be such a great stress reliever. I wanted to take the time to give a little bit more insight on my own personal experiences with music.

I have always loved music, even before I was born I felt inspired by the sound of it. My mom recounts multiple occasions where I would be kicking her inside of her belly when a particularly good song came on the radio. I would always be dancing and singing as I got older. Not only was it fun but it was a great way to express myself. There wasn’t a car ride where the radio wasn’t on or a CD/tape wasn’t playing. Still to this day I enjoy singing along to songs on the radio either alone or with others.

As soon as the opportunity arrived in elementary school I decided to pick up an instrument. It was a violin. I was really excited to play and learn more about it but my young and spirited mind expected the classes to be less structured than they were. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to pay attention but I wanted to play what I wanted. It was also difficult to make myself practice outside of class. After a year of that I tried out for the school chorus and fell in love with singing immediately. I was in chorus all the way up until high school. When I got to middle school we had an amazing music teacher but due to school budget cuts she could no longer teach for us. And with that went my days of learning music at school. 

I was thankful for the internet at this point. Youtube was becoming a thing and so were music videos. It was so cool to be able to look up your favorite songs and then listen to them over and over again whenever you wanted to. For my birthday one year I asked for a keyboard. Why not try another type of instrument? I had a couple books and I knew how to follow the lighted keys well enough but I wanted to be able to play my favorite songs. Luckily there were tutorials on Youtube! When I wasn’t busy with school work I would sit myself down in front of my desk top computer with my keyboard in my lap as I watched videos on how to play songs like "Clocks" by Coldplay. The only problem I had with this was that it took awhile for me to memorize them but once I did it was all muscle memory. I didn’t need to know what the keys meant just where I had to put my hands. Occasionally I still let my fingers run over the keys mindlessly playing that one song that my muscles remember better than I do.

High school began and an amazing game called Guitar Hero appeared into my life. This magnificent rhythm game was everything that I could have hoped for. After playing for only a short while I was already playing on expert mode and it was just too easy. My uncle had watched me play this video game several times and suggested I put down the plastic guitar and pick up a real one. He had been playing guitar recreationally since he was a teenager so he passed his guitar onto me. It was a dusty old acoustic guitar but to me it was beautiful. I began taking lessons at a music shop not far from home and picked up the instrument almost instantly. I would practice my cords every day until my fingers bled. I was so into it that my dad bought me my own electric/acoustic guitar. I had been playing guitar for about two years before I hit the peak of my progression. For some reason I had just stopped getting better. No matter how many songs I practiced or how long I played them for. I was starting to feel really down on myself. Why couldn’t I get better? Maybe it wasn’t the instrument for me after all? I came to learn that guitar was one of the easiest instruments to pick up but the hardest to master. I didn’t want to be amazing but I didn’t want to freeze up every time my instructor motioned me for a solo. I took a break for it for quite some time. I only felt worse about myself because I couldn’t remember a single song I had learned except the intro to "Today" by Smashing Pumpkins. I felt like I had failed myself. I’m still a bit ashamed every time I look at my guitar standing up in the corner of my room. 

Music has always been a huge part of my life as well as a few of my family member’s. When my mom was a teenager she would go to concerts all the time. She has seen Metallica at least five times. I was pretty jealous when I found this information out but I am very lucky to be her daughter because I developed some interesting musical tastes. For some reason middle school and early elementary school was a time for ‘pop music’. All my friends liked it but I grew out of that fast. Now there are only a very select few pop songs that I enjoy listening to.

As I got older I started going to concerts of my own, my very first: Flogging Molly. To me this represented my Irish heritage and I fell in love with Celtic rock and traditional Celtic music. As a kid I enjoyed a lot of the rock music that played on the radio as I was growing up, especially Smashing Pumpkins. When I got the chance to see them live in Boston, I couldn’t have been more excited. My dad and I arrived so early to the show that we were allowed to go in for a meet and greet with the record club (which I am now a part of). Billy Corgan talked to us for a short amount of time and let us ask him whatever questions we wanted. I was so tongue tied that I stayed quiet and just listened. He knew music in a completely different way than I did. He didn’t care if you liked his music or not, it was an expression of himself and how he dealt with going through different parts of his life. This opened up a whole new view for me and made me listen to music much different from that point on. Then came Tool.

My uncle introduced me to the unusual sounds of Maynard James Keenan. It was unlike any music I had heard up until that point in my life but it amazed me. I guess you could classify it as alternative metal or progressive rock but it doesn’t really matter to me what it’s called. I was beginning to deal with depression and anxiety in my life but this music eased it. It is sort of trance like listening to this music. It allows me to lift my spirit in a way, allowing it to travel and dance, not being held down by the weight of my own worries. I enjoy every off shoot band Maynard has and they all give me goose bumps when I listen to them, even after the 100^th listen. That to me is what makes his music so amazing and so enjoyable to sing along with his unique vocals. They were just as amazing live as they are on any recorded album.

I don’t think my love for music will ever cease. It has been there for me through good times and bad. From classical to metal I love a wide variety of music and artists. What I like to listen to most always depends on my mood or what I am doing at the time but my head is like a radio; there is always some song playing. And I think I like it that way.