Saturday, November 5, 2011

Fortune Favors the Bold

so I don't forget

Musical theatre

gets obnoxious quickly

Musical Phases

I'm pretty sure every musician has his or her own set of phases or stages in their musician ship in which they've grown as an artist. Here are my phases.

1. Metal Head Kid
Possibly, the loudest and most obnoxious phases in my opinion. I was the kid who thought that there was only one type of good music: loud, fast, and crazy trash metal. I grew out my hair so that it would move when I did headbangers. I said all other music was for the weak. I worshipped satan. All and all, I was sort of annoying. This lasted well into a year, but after that I started to grow sick of metal, metal heads, metal guitarists, and most of all... metal kids.









2. Alternative Rock 
This was a sort of gray area, and I'm not really sure how I got to this phase. I think it was to annoy the metal heads that I still knew (they hated everything that wasn't metal). I listened to 99X and acoustic music. I got a haircut, started wearing casual clothes, looked like I worked in a cubicle. This is also a blurry line of when I became an indie snob. I started playing drums A LOT. Two hours a day during some weeks; six hours whenever we had a snow day. I learned all sorts of neat drum stuff. 

3. Indie Snob


This phase was fortunately short lived. I was the kind of person who wouldn't listen to a band if it was popular. I'm not gonna talk about it too much, because the only thing I find more annoying than indie snobs, are the people who complain about them to much.


4. Vocal Pedagogy Obsessor
This is a weird one that I don't see many other people going through. This was a point in my musical life when I really wanted to be a singer. I was very self-conscious about my singing because people started telling me how bad I was, and I wanted to prove them wrong. I'm still a bit of method obsessed singer, because I strongly believe singing can be taught. Anyone who says that you're born with a good singing voice is full of it and doesn't know what they're talking about. This went along with a musical theatre obsession *shiver*.

5. Teen Pop Sensation

This was last year, essentially. I made a pop album for my personal project and started producing music.  I was really big on the entire producing thing. I still love it. It takes a lot of tedious work and I love the amount of focus it requires. I liked making pop music, mostly cause I thought it was funny, but I began to take myself a bit too seriously. I sort of realized that I'm not cut out to be a pop star, but I still think it's an interesting genre every few years when there's new music on the stations. 


6. Classical Music Composer

Realizing that I'm not cut out to be a performer, I've turned much more to composing. I love piano. I love classical music and it engulfs way to much of my life. The problem is that, nobody listens to classical music. There are very few people who I can actually talk to about music who wouldn't think I'm a snob, or would take me seriously. I really love to talk about classical music, also, which makes it a bit more annoying that nobody wants to talk about it. I had to go through the entire or ordeal of not being born to love classical music. Believe it or not, you get a lot of judgement from both sides if you suddenly gain an interest in classical music. A lot of friends said that I was only listening to it to sound smart, which became my most dreaded phrase when I first started. I was deadly self-concious about playing piano, because a few friends had said that I was doing it to be pretentious. Looking back I don't know why that was a fear, but it's still upsetting to know that people actually do that. What's worse is I'm developing an interest in Jazz. What are they gonna think of that?

7. To Be Continued...

Music

I love music. I know, almost everyone loves music, but I really just don't give it enough credit. It's been that one constant since I was in 6th grade. I've been obsessed with it in some way since I first played with Garageband's virtual keyboard when I was 12 years old. Even if my interests have expanded, they've never moved from music.

Strangely enough, before that, I knew almost nothing about music. The only songs I knew were Twinkle Twiknle Little Star and Toxic by Britney Spears (Don't judge. I was 9. I hadn't recovered from the 90s). Since then, I've been forever doomed to head down a musical path. I've gone through an entire rock band of instrumental obsession; practicing whichever instrument whenever I got the chance. I've been through every form of snobbery I can imagine (with more to come). I could talk on forever about every sort of phase I've been through.

Also strange, music has had very little effect on my life outside of music. Most of that has to do with the fact that not many people actually want to talk about music. I need to organize these posts better. I'm starting to realize that it was a bad idea to write with a prompt as broad as 'music.' Let's try this again.