The Resounding Success
The Best Of Roy Orbinson
By Shaktida at Ekko
“I’ve really learned a lot, really learned a lot, love is like a stove, burns you when it’s hot”
Life is a journey that isn’t so much about becoming anything. It is although, a lot more about unbecoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place. The first step to living a life that is worth all your time and efforts is to live it on your own terms so that the day you look back you don’t have any regrets. Call a spade a spade and if people frown let them. Don’t be afraid to show the world what makes you, YOU not matter how idiosyncratic your qualities are. This is exactly what the life of Roy Orbison, an American singer-musician and songwriter best known for his trademark sunglasses, distinctive powerful voice, complicated compositions and dark emotional ballads, taught us.
1. How can anyone see how great you are if you can’t see it yourself?
Self confidence is one of the best qualities that anyone can have. It doesn’t matter how big a feat you want to accomplish, as long as you are confident about achieving success there isn’t anything that can pull you back.
Orbison was born on April 23, 1936 to a father who was a car mechanic and an oil driller and a mother who was a nurse. They were unemployed during the Great Depression. All the Orbison children had poor eyesight. Roy Orbison was no different. He was a regular boy with an average student record with nothing extraordinary to add to his personality except his voice which he considered memorable if not great.
2. Be miserable or motivate yourself. What has to be done, it’s always your choice.
You have brains in your head and you have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who’ll decide where to go.
Orbison had had a very normal childhood. With his eye problem and not so outstanding record as a student, Orbison later recalled that, by the age of seven, “I was finished, you know, for anything else.” That is when he decided to turn music into his life and give himself a direction and purpose.
3. Let your strengths define you, not your weakness.
Whether you sit and sulk on what you can’t do or you get up and do what you can is what defines who you are. No one is completely useless; everyone has that one quality that makes him special. Find that out and let that define who you are.
Roy Orbison, who didn’t have the Beatles’ looks, Sinatra’s swagger or Elvis’s pelvis, was perhaps the most unlikely sex symbol of the 1960s. He dressed like an insurance salesman and was famously lifeless during his performances. What Orbison did have was one of the most distinctive, versatile and powerful voices in pop music. In the words of Elvis Presley, Orbison was simply “the greatest singer in the world.”
4. Your struggles today become a benchmark for tomorrow.
On landing a record deal with Monument on 1960, Orbison started working towards perfecting that sound that would define him and his career. He composed a song “Only the lonely” and tried to pitch it to Elvis Presley and Everly Brothers but both declined it. Deciding to record the song himself, Orbison used his vibrato voice and operatic style to create a recording unlike anything Americans had heard at the time. Reaching as high the No. 2 spot on the Billboard singles chart, “Only the Lonely” has since been deemed a pivotal force in the development of rock music.
5. If you can dream it you can do it.
A very clichéd quote, yes but that doesn’t in anyway pull down the essence of the message it tries to convey. Success is connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit. So yes, if you can dream it, you can do it.
The combination of Orbison’s powerful, impassioned voice and complex musical arrangements led many critics to refer to his music as operatic, giving him the sobriquet “the Caruso of Rock”.Elvis Presley as well as Petty and Dylan, have stated his voice was, respectively, the greatest and most distinctive they had ever heard.
6. The sounds of your success echo forever.
Orbison was initiated into the second class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 by longtime admirer Bruce Springsteen. The same year he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the Songwriters Hall of Fame two years later. Rolling Stone placed Orbison at number 37 on their list of The Greatest Artists of All Time, and number 13 on their list of The 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. In 2002, Billboard magazine listed Orbison at number 74 in the Top 600 recording artists. In 2014, Orbison was elected to America’s Pop Music Hall of Fame.
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