Advanced Essay #2 (Start of Rewind)

This essay explores the way teaching one's self music can change your worldview. I explore how influences and lack of proper musical training can provide the world with a deeper and more mysterious meaning. 

The gray smog sat like a wiry wool blanket over my block. Filling the spaces between duplexes with a thick dampness. The fog gagged the open air, it bit at the wood beams and expanded door frames and made the house feel slow and cold. I was lying in my room, with my back against the floor. My socks were soaked from the walk and were leaving ghostly streaks along my water damaged wall. My finger reversed the tape, the black plastic whirred between the teeth of side A until a light click signalled the end of the rewind. I slid the worn headset over my ears, the faux leather snug against my head, and hit the yellowed plastic play key.

Music has been perpetually present throughout my childhood, a silent buzz beneath the heavy breath of life. Equivalent to the hum of an A.C. unit or the hiss of a radiator. I have distinct memories of sitting in ACME parking lots with my father listening to metal or punk. He would blare The Police and blow curling smoke out of the window. I would sit strapped into my booster seat singing, “Rock Sand!” Along to the song. As the years past and as I grew too large for booster seats and too cool for Sting lyrics, I began to notice the intricacies beneath music.

My father had played guitar since age fourteen, so there was always a cheap acoustic in the corner of the room. It was equivalent to a lamp or a framed photograph. It wasn’t until my freshmen year of high school (when I started listening to The Smiths and The Dirty Projectors) that I began to notice the instrumentation and not just the feeling of each song. I picked up the dusty guitar and taught myself to play. This quote from Superman and Me perfectly speaks to this situation, “I can remember picking up my father’s books before I could read. The words themselves were mostly foreign, but I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph.” (2) In this quotation it is clear that instead of reading literacy I am exploring the literacy of music which I adopted from my father.

As time progressed the idea of songwriting became more prevalent in my mind. I quickly moved away from learning songs, once I understood basic chords I found variations and places on the frets that held a sourness or brightness that provided more character to songs. I took the mathematical side of music and explored it through a natural lense, the musical theory became instinct and/or logic. I was nowhere close to understanding the instrument fully but I was beginning to grow acquainted. I began using my unique knowledge to write these bedroom compositions, which quickly began to alter my world view. I began hearing music in a different light, like I was watching the stage play from behind the curtain. Sounds and melodies would erupt from the streets, everything began to influence me. From my IPod’s playlist to the car alarm that kept me up until two in the morning. This language of music was clawing itself out of me, rubbing calluses into my hands and painting my eyes purple with sleep deprivation.

There was a single night where I played the same original piece tirelessly, plucking each note and assigning moods and characteristics to each portion of the song. There was an itch, a tingling urgency to immortalise what I had made. I found myself in my basement digging through mildewy boxes of polaroids and 2008 check receipts and removed my father’s old four track. It was a Tascam with a single blank tape in its deck. I entered my room and began to record, the milky crunch of the dusty plastic made my heart flutter and my will grow. When I ultimately reached a sense of finality the sun had risen. My bones were sore and my hands were damp, and I had to walk to shake my nervousness.