I had a conversation with my mother last night about how goals change. Actually, it wasn’t so much a conversation, but rather her telling me things I already knew and repeating things I told her a while back... in other words: nothing new. It was a lesson I learned in early 2004. But I’ve also been noticing that aspects of my life that were once very important to me just aren’t anymore, such as music.

I’ve actually been noticing this trend since I was a junior in college. About two years prior to that time, I was in a band – writing songs and playing shows. We broke up in February of my freshman year and I had been half-heartedly trying to put another band together in my sophomore and junior year, but at some point I realized I wasn’t actually trying to do that anymore. My songwriting had pretty much ground to a halt and I was barely even picking up my guitar. Instead, I was putting all my energy into school, which was fine. I was having fun with it at the time and I barely noticed that something was missing.

But at some point during the end of my junior year I did hear a record I was really impressed with (Precious Blood by Ghosts and Vodka [of all records!]) and it reminded me of what I was missing. This was the time in my life that I came closest to getting a tattoo. Thank god I didn’t, because I would have ended up with the Vodka-drinking Ghost from that album on the ball of my left shoulder.

But the point of getting that tattoo would have been to remind me of the role that music had played in my life. Obviously, I’m glad I didn’t get the tattoo, but in a way I do regret not doing anything about the decline of music’s importance in my life. It used to be such a big part of life, in fact, it was the biggest part of my life between the ages of 12 and 22 and I’m also quite sure it was rather important before and after that peak period.

A few nights ago, I couldn’t sleep and I took out one of my electric guitars – I wanted to play around a little bit un-amped late at night and I thought my acoustic would be enough to wake up the neighbors (I’ve been causing them enough grief with my bicycle trainer lately). It hadn’t been so long since I opened up the guitar case, but it was ages since I went through what was inside. My last band broke up over seven years ago and everything in there was from that time. It was like a weird unintentional time capsule: there were lyrics of a pretty awful and overly poetic song I wrote and only performed once (at our third and last show) called “in just spring” (based on the e e cummings poem of the same name), lyrics from a song I wrote in high school (a song I can’t even remember the melody to) and some truly embarrassing lyrics written by my former band mate for a song called “thinking that’s all”. I remember hating those lyrics back then, but man... I wish we had just had some respect for each other. If we had worked together instead of against one another, I think we could have balanced each other out: my lyrics were too poetical and emo, his just sounded like a teenager trying to write words that sounded like lyrics, but his input probably could have brought me back down to earth. Likewise, the music I was writing was catchy, but too straightforward while his had neat hooks to them, but was almost too math rock. It wasn’t meant to be, though and that’s fine.

A few weeks ago, Antje and I went to see a show with one of my favorite bands playing (Aloha – a band we actually played that last show with). Although they have headlined and sold out bigger places in New York than the Warsaw Theater, they ended up opening. I wanted to stick around for the other bands, not only because we paid a lot for our tickets but also because I wanted to force myself to listen to something new. But I couldn’t bring myself to stick around. The second band was obnoxious (as was the crowd, whose average age was probably 20) and we were too tired from spending the previous day walking around the Natural History Museum. Besides, as my roommate Steve said, “Sundays weren’t made for rock and roll”.

I was disappointed with myself though. In my freshman and sophomore year of college, I used to go to shows so often – sometimes just to see bands I had only heard good things about. Now I can’t even bring myself to stay past the opening act. I even bought a CD about a month ago that I still haven’t even listened to. Antje has tried to console me in this loss by saying that it is “scientifically proven” that interest in music decreases with age, and I can buy that. However, I’m starting to miss music in my life. At the same time though, I can’t force myself to get into it. For example, nearly everyone I know has been raving about Arcade Fire, but I just wasn’t impressed with Funeral, and I don’t think it’s so much a problem with the record as much as it’s a problem with me. Maybe I just need to give it a few more listens. I’ve heard their new one a few times and liked it, but again it didn’t grab me like music used to.

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to record more music. Right now on this (heavily neglected) web page, I have two acoustic versions of songs posted. I really want to up that number. One problem though, is that Cakewalk’s Sonar 4 has this weird compressor that clips my volume whenever I play my guitar with any type of distortion or even if it’s just loud for a while. You can even hear it on those two acoustic songs (at the bridge of Coffee + Conversation especially). I’ve already spent hours trying to figure out how to turn it off, but I’ll have to try play around with it again. I don’t want to open my guitar case seven years from now and not remember the melody of the songs I’ve written over these past few years.

Posted by redscarf at 10:17 PM | Comments (2)