10/21/2024
Life is moving too fast with too much going on!...
Recently (a couple weeks ago?), our very dear friends Ben & Miriam took us to see Jeff Lynn's ELO concert as a belated anniversary gift. And while I enjoyed the experience immensely, it also reminded me of a dark, yet common, theme in my life. All the good stuff in my life seems to be tied intimately to bad stuff.
I absolutely love music; it's my first love. I hummed songs before I found my words. Mom made sure I got at least 4 years of piano lessons and took Concert and Jazz band in school - which I loved. And she sang around the house all the time with her beautiful voice. And my therapist noted the other day how I light up every time I talk about music.
But, one day, as a young man, I jumped in the car with a bunch of my cousins and excitedly put in a CD I was very excited about. I obsessed over it, at the time, and its still in my top 100 albums of all time! And as the intro to ELO's album Time started up, suddenly I got a bunch of loud insults from my cousins over how horrible it was! And how stupid I was. This was the same group of cousins at another time who insulted me when I mentioned I thought I could write a song similar to the one we were listening to.
This was a very common experience in my youth, and not just from my cousins. It seemed that everyone, except for my immediate family, put me down on a regular basis. I grew up with VERY low self-esteem.
In high-school, once, I took two micro-cassette recorders, beat-boxed a rhythm track on the first, played it back and added a bass line, bounced that back, adding some melody, and kept going until that first take - the rhythm section - was just too buried under all that tape hiss. It was fun. But I never told anyone I ever did that, until now. And I only did it once. I didn't attempt to write music again until my best friend ended his life when I was 21 and his parents gave me most of his music equipment (everything but the guitar; keyboard, mic, drum machine, 4-track recorder, etc.).
For years, I attempted to write music - hundreds of songs - but there was always something inside that held me back. I wrote a few good songs, but not many. The rest were just OK.
Then, in my early 40s, C-PTSD ruined my life... and unleashed the real musician and writer in me. The previous decade, I had been conquering my low self-esteem with reality and the anger that I ever believed anyone who put me down.
And after putting together a collection of songs that I, my wife, and even my musician brother-in-law who doesn't even like my style of music (he's into punk music, I'm not) think is amazing... it was all ripped away from me more than a year ago...
I don't have the money to replace the audio interface for my computer that's probably still hiding in some box around here. I can't access the songs. And I don't have the time, with this awful money pit of a house we were forced to buy, at the worst time, anyway. And I was SO CLOSE to being ready to start releasing some of it. With music videos!
So, as I stood there, dancing to Jeff Lynn's wonderful music, overwhelmed with emotion as I usually am at concerts, tears pouring down my face... I tried my best to forget my tragic musical past.
I tried.
