The teenage years were a funny old time for me...
I lost quite a lot of people over a short period of time, and looking back on it I learnt to suppress a lot of feelings. This delayed me becoming who I am today and I feel I only really found myself in my mid twenties. When I was 14 my father died after a short spell with cancer. We had just been on a great summer holiday in Florida, we came back, had a nice Christmas, and by February he was gone. It was a surreal time, and made me feel very lonely. I was too young to talk to my friends about it, too young to go out and get drunk, and too young to fully understand what on earth had just happened, and to be honest I still can’t, but I am smart enough now to realise that these things just happen. When I lost my dad my progress got put on hold, I was lonely and had no direction but then something was about to change, even if it was minimal at the start, it changed me significantly in the long run, and due to these very hard times I would produce some of my greatest results.
Two years later I lost my final grandparent, and what I now struggle with most is not knowing these significant people in my life long enough and as an adult, but it was at this moment I touched my first ever guitar, it was a large classical acoustic guitar; almost bigger than me (which wasn't hard), I had no interest in music, and didn’t consider the guitar as anything I’d ever like to learn. I never heard my grandad play it, and I knew of no one else in my family who played an instrument, but I saw it in his bungalow after we had been at his funeral, I turned to my mum and said “who gets the guitar?”, she turned back to me and said “do you want to be the next John Lennon?” I replied with a confused pause "who?”.
I won’t go into the details of learning the guitar on this post, as that will be covered in the future. All you need to know is I was awful, truly awful. Just ask my mum who had to hear every damn poorly timed strumming pattern, endless broken chords, and a singing voice that sounded like I was speaking loudly… to be honest not much has changed. I started to take the guitar a little more seriously around 2010, I hadn’t learnt the traditional way as I was self-taught, so I just tried to learn the obvious acoustic songs like Green Day Time of Your Life, Coldplay Yellow, and Take That… there was no room for iambic pentameters.
However in 2010, I heard a song that would change me forever. It seems bizarre nowadays that before that year I had never heard of this guy, he rules my musical life now, I have always known I have an addictive personality, but he has taken things to new heights. I started to watch a movie called Watchmen. I sat down, pressed play, and the guitar started strumming, it was no nonsense, not a palm mute or love ballad in sight, and out came this bizarre, rustic voice, whaling out a song that seemed to have more meaning and intrigue than all the songs I had ever listened too put together, it was at this moment I knew that I wanted to write songs that represented my feelings and my confusion of the world I had grown up in, I wanted to merge metaphors with literal situations, I wanted to write songs filled with joy and hate, I wanted to be cynical, I wanted to be powerful and make people smile and cry with the songs I wrote, I wanted it all, and you all have Bob Dylan to blame for that. As a note, the sequence at the start of Watchmen merged with Bob Dylan’s Times are a Changin is the greatest five minutes and 34 seconds in movie history.
After I heard this song I got better at my grandad's guitar, I then bought a new and beautiful Faith Electric-Acoustic, I got my head down and listened to countless Bob Dylan songs, and then tried to learn them. I sat down and wrote about eight songs, all of them were awful, but then I wrote a song called Home which started my radio airplay journey, but I will speak more about that in a future post. There was only one problem with Bob Dylan… my mum couldn’t stand him, but we all had to accept that he was in our lives now, and I think nowadays she can enjoy him, a little bit more anyway. We only ever argued about Dylan when I introduced the harmonica to my playing, that didn’t go down to well, my cats hated it too. One thing for certain though, was that music to me was the songwriting process, and I don’t mean ten suits in a room writing a love song, I mean picking up a guitar with your mates or on your own, and writing songs that represent what music is to you.
As covered in the first couple of paragraphs. The guitar came about at a time when I lacked any direction, and that was reflecting in my personality as I felt in those years I achieved very little other than to endure the pain of losing a parent, and surrounding myself with the wrong people for me, this has now changed and I am very happy. Once the guitar was introduced it very slowly changed my life. I now play daily as well as having various songs played on the radio, performing gigs, and releasing an album full of my little songs that I’ve written. I know my style will never reach the masses, but music isn’t about that to me, it’s about finding a path that I lacked so very much growing up, anything else that happens with it is a bonus.
I always felt I never had any musical influences in my early life until I heard Dylan, but since getting older I’ve discovered my mum has a killer music taste, Cat Stevens, The Beatles, Johnny Cash and Simon & Garfunkel just to name a few. I also at Christmas got all my dad’s old vinyls out the attic, and boy did he have one hell of a taste, I was just too young to appreciate this. And then one day I looked at a picture of my mum and dad sitting happily in a living room, the picture had been in my house for years but I always struggled to look at pictures of him, as I stared into the vintage styled image, I noticed a faded brown acoustic guitar in the background, I turned to my mum and said “whose was that?”, she looked at me and said “it was your dads”... I smiled.
... and that is how I stumbled into music.
LINKS
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