I Woke Up One Day And The Music Was Gone
Not making the time for something I loved.
When I was a teenager I loved music.
Music was my life.
I wasn’t into sports. I wasn’t overly academic. I just. Loved. Music.
I listened to anything I could get my hands on. From my all time favourite guilty pleasures of the Spice Girls and Robbie Williams to the emotionally heavy and melancholic Radiohead.
Rock, Rap, Blues, Jazz. Loved it all. Everything from N.W.A to Kings of Leon to Darude. I was obsessed with everything, with no apparent rhyme nor reason.
I studied music in school. I played guitar.
I did the typical teenage thing of joining a band.
I experienced the excitement of playing to small intimate crowds. I experienced the euphoria of playing to crowds bigger than I could have dreamed of.
I went to college and my band split. I got more and more caught up with study so I ran out of time to play as often as I used to. Books became my new music. At the time not out of desire but out of necessity. I cracked out my acoustic guitar and began playing that religiously, as my electric guitars gathered dust.
The more time that went by the less and less I played, and the less and less I seemed to enjoy music.
I began to listen to whatever was trending in the charts as well as a collection of my old favourites.
YouTube and the radio began to steer my taste in music. I stopped exploring music, deep diving into albums and artists I found interesting.
I remember the Christmas before my final year of college, I got a shiny new acoustic guitar. I think in a way I knew I’d lost the passion for it and I hoped that would reinvigorate it. I got a big fancy (read expensive) hard case for it.
I would play it a bit, then slide it under my bed in it’s case. The time between plays would become greater and greater.
By the time I graduated I hadn’t looked at it in a year. I went straight into a job out of college, working long hours and not having time for myself let alone to make music.
Fast forward another 2 years, and my girlfriend asks, “why don’t you take your guitar out later?”.
I was completely taken aback. It’s something I had given no time to, no thought to, in years. It had been so long since I even touched a guitar, I was convinced I wouldn’t be able to play anything let alone remember it.
I took it out and turned on the in-built tuner. Seeing the little LEDs pulse in sequence as it powered me on struck me with a wave of nostalgia.
I suddenly got caught up in the music again. The things I was listening to, I started REALLY listening to. I was picking out rhythms, chord progressions, beats, things that I had kind of become deaf to.
Not a day has gone by in the 3 weeks since that I haven’t taken out my guitar. Jamming away to myself. Getting caught up again in something that used to be the most important thing in my life. Something I’d let slip away from me because my life became too busy.
At the end of the day, life is short. We shouldn’t sacrifice the things we enjoy or forget about them. Be it music, sport, cooking, reading, writing, gaming. Whatever your passion. Don’t lose it.
Don’t fall out of love with it. I can’t describe the joy since it’s come back into my life. I feel I’ve regained something incredibly important, but didn’t realise had been stolen.
