"My Aspiration" by Joey R

“There is always that one band that comes along when you are 14 or 15 years old that manages to hit you in just the right way and changes your whole perception of things.” Alex Turner, vocalist and guitarist of Arctic Monkeys

      Music is one of the most important aspects of my life. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a bassist, vocalist, and a songwriter. I may not be that great at it yet, I still do what I can with it, and I just one day want to be able to perform and compose my own music. This is just something I am passionate to do in life. My interest in music started in middle school. I was a fan of bands such as Green Day, My Chemical Romance, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Arctic Monkeys, and more. At first, music was just something in life I let wash over me, then I started connecting it to my life. The became less of a mixture of sounds and became an entire world. As a teenager, times started getting stressful adapting to the idea of growing up and fitting in and trying to find the things that made me who I am. As I connected music to these events, I started thinking, “Hey, these lyrics are really from the heart and there’s so much to music that I still don’t know yet. Perhaps I can do the same thing one day and learn and experience the raw emotion from these songs.” So I started analyzing the music, and looking at the meaning behind the music and listening for the vocals and instruments in depth. There is an absolute myriad of feelings that are conveyed in the music, whether the song is emotional, political, rebellious, or anything. There is some sort of emotion being conveyed. 

     For example, the song “In The Garage” is something I can connect to because I spend more time making music, practicing with my bandmate, playing video games, and living in my garage more than anything. The lyrics, “In the garage, I feel safe. No one cares about my ways. In the garage, where I belong. No one hears me sing this song. In the garage, I feel safe. No one laughs about my ways.” connect to me so much. I spend so much of my time in my garage just trying to get an escape from life. I may think I’m a dweeb or a loser or something just for the things I do, but it’s what makes me happy, because I’m in a safe place. Music in itself is a safe place. The reason why I aspire to do something in music is because I just want to live in my own world and perform the symphony of the inner workings of my head. Songwriting my life is difficult because putting emotions and events down onto paper is something I am just not completely used to, but it’s something really beautiful to see when just one sentence becomes a whole song. Even when playing bass, when I’m covering some songs or playing my own riffs, I feel the pureness of the pureness of sounds like it’s some sort of religion I have fully devoted myself to. And here I am saying it’s hard for me to put my emotions onto paper but I’m contradicting that statement by doing exactly that with absolute ease. Over the short months, I’ve met people who have supported me in my musical adventure, and it is the most respected I have felt to hear from people who like my writings. To conclude because I simply have no other words or I just simply don’t want to be long winded, music is the thing I am going to do in life, and if I’m not doing this stuff in 10 years, pay me a friendly reminder to pick myself up and continue chasing this dream.