musical autobiography

Though I was born into a family of Western Art musicians, I wasn’t as exposed to Western Art music as much as I was exposed to popular music. I grew up listening to classic rock. My favorite band as a child was Styx, and my parents fulfilled my childhood dream when they took me to a free Styx concert in Jacksonville, Florida, when I was just five years old. The concert was one of the very first things I remember about my life. My parents exposed to a new form of expression through music, even though they just thought they were making a little girl’s dreams of seeing her favorite band come true. I will never forget how happy and completely carefree I felt as I sat on my dad’s shoulders listening to my favorite music. I’ve been addicted to attending live shows ever since.

Just two years later when I was about seven, my parents took my sister and I to a small venue in our hometown of Columbia, SC. One of my dad’s coworkers had invited us to come see her husband play a show with his banjo. He had just won first place in the National Bluegrass Banjo Competition. I remember feeling extremely out of place; most of the people at the concert were 35-year-old balding males with beer guts and trucker hats. I also remember being quite perplexed when I heard the first sounds coming from the banjo. I didn’t really like it at first. I had never heard anything like that before. As the concert went on, the sound grew on me a little (I still didn’t care much for it), but I became really impressed as I watched and listened as the fast finger pickings got faster and faster. It was one of the most amazing things I had ever seen, and I decided then that I wanted to be that good at playing an instrument one day.

When I was around the same age, or a little younger, I liked to watch a lot of movies. My favorite movie as a kid was The Nightmare Before Christmas. Even as a child, I loved the music of the movie. I distinctly remember performing one of the songs, “Jack’s Lament,” for my grandparents on my little Fisher-Price tape player with the microphone. Ever since I fell in love with the music of that movie, I have been extremely interested in film music, and I have remained a big fan of Danny Elfman (the composer of Nightmare).

One of my more recent encounters with music outside the Western Art world was just last year. The summer before last, I dedicated all my time learning how to play the acoustic guitar I had for years but never touched. I learned just by playing cover songs, and I put my own spin on each one. When I got back to school last year, a couple of my friends who run the Garden Variety club at Converse talked to me about doing a concert to raise money for an organization GoGlobal. I agreed to participate, and in April of last year, I stepped on the stage with my guitar and my voice and performed for people for the first time. I sang cover songs, so, not only was I worried about singing badly and messing up the chords, but I was worried that I would forget the words to the songs that I knew the audience would know. It was an extremely scary thing for me to do, but it was incredibly exhilarating. It is definitely something I would do again, but I do hope that it’s a little less nerve-wracking next time.