Growing up, I listened to music a lot. I would spend hours singing along with the Monkees, the Beach Boys, and Weezer. There was a small stereo in my room which I would put my ears right next to and pretend the band was in front of me playing live. Eventually, I decided I was interested in performing music myself. It was a little hard to really learn how to play. I grew up in a family that wasn't very musical. Nobody in my family really played any instruments, aside from my dad being able to play a few chords on the guitar. My next-door neighbor, a boy my age, and I would sit outside on his front lawn and sing songs while attempting to play the keyboard pictured above. This period went on for a while.
One Christmas, though, my friend got a guitar... and DRUMS. This was a breakthrough. We needed to learn how to play these instruments. It led to many hours banging on drums and making distortion with his grumpy, chain-smoking parents yelling at us to quiet down. During this time, I remember three songs that I "wrote." I'm using the word "wrote" rather loosely, because only one of these songs involved actual instrumental work. One was titled "Stop Messin' Around With Me," which was a bubblegum pop song similar to N'Sync and the Backstreet Boys. Another was a Linkin Park-esque "I Need a Pill." These songs were written with completely serious intentions, but looking back they are definitely more like parodies of two genres. The final song was "Lions and Dandelions." This was a folk song played over 4 chords on a guitar. (To those musicians out there, it was a D, A, B, G progression) I still remember how these songs sounded, and can still sing them when asked to. I think I have a recent recording of Lions and Dandelions, I'll attach it to this post.
Lions and Dandelions.mp3 I apologize for my singing, I must have had a bad day vocally.
Eventually, my next-door neighbor/the very naive McCartney to my equally naive Lennon moved to Georgia, and I followed a year later, moving north. At this point, I was listening to a lot of Lemon Demon, Ben Folds, and They Might Be Giants. On top of this, I was actually recording my own songs now! Most of these songs were cheap, synth-pop TMBG ripoffs with really bad singing and titles like "Mr. Onion Ring Man," "Say Hello to the Village Idiot," "Good Night, Nice Dreams," and "I Wanna Be a Jedi." Well, that was 3 years ago. I still occasionally listen to They Might Be Giants and Lemon Demon and I still record my own music, but lately I've been trying to expand my horizons musically and discover other great music out there. I guess that is what this blog is going to be about! You can find my Last.fm here. Here I'll review music, or discuss recording, maybe compare bands, or whatever.
Have a nice night!
