Earlier today someone asked me how I "got into music." My gut reaction was "well DUH everyone likes music" but then a split second later I kind of wanted to hit myself for saying that when I've often thought about it in that way, obviously everyone likes music but to some people it seems like a necessity, sustenance to their life while others don't care for it particularly, they just listen to what they think sounds nice. I wanted to reply to this question thoughtfully but the 140 character limit on twitter is pretty restricting so I guess it's lucky that I have a blog then really isn't it. It's not a particularly interesting or enlightening story but I suppose it's value is in the fact that it's my own and everyone's individual experiences are different. I tried to explain the feeling and sad recent story of falling out of love with one of my favourite bands to a friend but realised after typing it all out that while to me it was a whirlwind of emotions and conflicting thoughts and memories and nostalgia and notes that pulled at heartstrings I'd rather be left untouched, to them the words just read "I used to like really like totally love this band then they were like dicks and I didn't like them anymore then I like went to see them for like old times sake just cause I felt like it and then I kind of liked them again and now like I think I still like them but I don't like... know." People's relationships with music are like people's relationships with others, no one can understand how it really makes you feel, no one wants to hear about it, adequately put by Pete & Carl; "it's important to me, I tried to make you see but you don't want to know." But to you it can change your life and ruin your mood and make you inexplicably overjoyed but other people's feelings= BORING.
When I was thirteen, I didn't realise it but I was basically having an existential crisis. I was really lame and trying to lose loads of weight, I was weird and didn't have a set group of friends because the people I used to hang out with decided I wasn't clever enough to spend lunchtimes with me because I didn't want to discuss current affairs for fun and I didn't fit in with the popular girls even though they sometimes saw me sitting on my own in the classroom counting calories every break time and invited me to sit with them but the only common ground I had with them was dieting and I had nothing of any interest to input into their conversations. I'd always found myself wanting to like things that other people around me weren't interested in, not that I realised it in such explicit terms and I didn't know what that thing that I was looking for was at all, I just knew I didn't like Girls Aloud and I didn't like Westlife. One day I ended up sitting with a completely different group of girls from a completely different form, and found I actually enjoyed the conversation I had with them and what was even WEIRDER was that they seemed to want to talk to me. One of the people in this group was my now best friend Lucy who was new to the school. Cut a not that long but mildly creepy story short, I thought Lucy was the bees knees and the cats pyjamas etc etc etc so I surreptitiously forced my company upon her presence until she grew to mildly tolerate me and forced her to be my friend. When I was growing up, my main musical exposure consisted of Elvis, The Beautiful South, Paul McCartney & Wings, Stevie Wonder and Elton John, and this one song by that band The Beatles I think they were called?? dressed up in military jackets about Pepper and a club for lonely hearts. For the first time in my life, while at the time, these artists (apart from Elton John really) didn't hold as much apparent and aching sentimental meaning to me as they do now, they did have some sort of resonance, and Lucy was the only person I'd met that appreciated that Elvis was kind of cool and "oh my god you know the song 'Band On the Run' too??
you're like my musical soulmate!" Okay that bit didn't happen but had these events taken place four years later I would have probably said that and it would have been true. The more
I infringed on Lucy's personal space and stalked her myspace into oblivion time I spent with Lucy in awe of how cool she was and how she always seemed to float around in a time travelling bubble straight from the 60's, the more we became friends and the more her interests started to rub off on me and before I knew it I too listened to the Beatles and the Smiths and Joy Division and we watched Control and I cried and so we watched A Hard Day's Night to lighten the mood and I realised the missing jigsaw from my life was music and without me realising, finally making a really brilliant couple of friends and finding out that you can suddenly go from being a super lame human to a moderately less lame human being if you like good music. During one conversation between me and Lucy where she was teaching me how to be rad, she told me to download this song called 505 which she told me was amazing, and well...I'm pretty certain that you know the rest of the story. Unfortunately the other side of my forever growing love and relationship with the best band in the world was slightly marred by them bringing me and some stupid prick together but all boys are and they ruin everything & that's a completely different story which I have forced myself to forget about anyway. Arctic Monkeys made everything in the world incredible and from then on, I really
noticed music, my music taste started broadening and I wanted to play it myself and I started teaching myself guitar and well it just seemed that music started changing my life and it helped me make friends and put all my thoughts into words and notes and melodies that made sense to me and now music takes up about 85% of my life and I still to this day force Lucy to spend time with me and we still talk about musicians as though they're our friends and I suppose if anyone considers me a mildly kind of okay/ace person then they have Lucy to credit for that. Perhaps I should also charge all my festival bills to her too.
I appreciate this is horribly written and doesn't do it justice but it's half twelve and I'd like to write it properly someday and like I said it doesn't make a difference to anyone else what my words say or how I've written them because it doesn't really matter and for all you know I could have made all of this up in fact I don't even have any friends who are Arctic Monkeys what is a a Ringo Starr?
