…we have grown.
It’s in every step I take. From the way I wear my hat to my desire to not only rock and roll all night, but also find a way to party every day. I am a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm, born to run like a bat out of Hell, fueled entirely by one thing: music.
It’s been there whenever I needed it. Music would always find me. In the happiest moments of my life that I never wanted to end, to my saddest moments of despair that seemed like they never would. It can raise me up to heights unknown to us common Earth folk, far outside of our stratosphere, but it can just as powerfully send me crashing me down in the kind of flat spin that cost us Goose many moons ago. It owns me, mind, body and soul, and I would have it no other way. Surrounded by people I love? Music has been there. Alone, unsure if I can make it one more day? Music has been there. It has taught me love, it has taught me hate, it has taught me obsession, it has taught me forgiveness. It has taught me how to feel. Taught me how to remember. Taught me how to forget.
Music has been such an important part of my life, riding shotgun through the grand universe of the day-to-day, never knowing where we were headed, but knowing that when we got there, we’d have gotten there together. But something happened. I don’t know when and I don’t know why, but music climbed in the back seat, still in the car with me and still there for the journey, but no longer my co-pilot charting our course. No longer reading the map and telling me where to go. How to go. Music went from being an active sidekick, the Ernie Reyes Jr. to my Gil Gerard, to a passive passenger, quiet so often that at times I find myself offering a fatherly, “You alright back there, bud?” Sometimes I can hear music singing along from behind me, but most days I just see it when I peer into my rear view, humming along to its own song, gazing out the window, trying to figure its own things out. We’re still close. We always will be. And we still talk, but we’re just not as tight as we used to be.
Ooh…. growin’ up.
Adulting. Life. At some point, I reached a certain age where time hit a Gulf Stream-like current and is now seemingly blowing by with every blink of the eye. Or maybe it has nothing to do with age. Maybe it’s just how things are now. Especially with music. Everything happens so fast, with no time to devour and savor, stop and replay and stop and replay and stop and replay on a seemingly never-ending loop (why would we want it to end!?) until you can tell yourself that you finally understand exactly why your new favorite singer chose to audibly exhale in that one small moment before the second chorus. That moment of pure imperfect vulnerability where they decided to let it all hang out. There has to be a reason she or he or they left it there intentionally. Not for the casual listener, but for us. The ones who were not just listening, but really listening. The ones who wanted to understand. The only ones who could understand. The dreamers and the forlorn. This wasn’t for the dilettantes. This was for us.
Yes, I am now singing the jaded, cynical reprise of the old man, a walking cliché bathed in the warm remembrance of a time when “things were better,” dare I say it, “back in my day.”* But I swear, dear reader… I swear I’m not that guy! I can’t be that guy wearing his Death’s head belt buckle, pining for yesterday’s dreams, can I? Too old to rock and roll, but too young to die?
Maybe. Maybe I am. But you know what? I don’t want to be. I wanna rock, goddamnit, all praise be to Dee Snyder. That, my friends, is where this blog comes in. This website. This media network. This daydream that I cooked up and have been kicking around in my stupid A.D.D. infested brain, whatever this ends up being. Yo! That’s My Jawn! It’s been dying to get out. I want to talk about music. I want to make music. I want to tell music, hey man… how about you come back up in the front seat of this car and take that seat next to me that you have always belonged in, while I roll down the windows and crack open the sun roof so the whole damn world can hear us belting out “Heartbeat (It’s a Lovebeat)” by the DeFranco Family at the top of our lungs, unafraid to show the world that, yes, we’re crazy, but we’re crazy together, in good or bad weather, happy or sad, every goddamn single day of our lives.
This is going to be my happy little space to share my love of music. A place to put some album reviews, be it a new release or some back catalog gem that’s been stuck on repeat in my headphones for the past 17 years or something that changed my life. I want to share some songs that I wrote in another life when I played the role of “aspiring musician” that I was too shy or too self-conscious to let anyone else listen to for fear that they might hate it, or worse yet, like it. I want to deconstruct the earworms that continuously threaten to colonize my brain and try to find a way to evict them from my head. I want to talk about the industry and I want to talk about what’s moving me and what isn’t. But most importantly, I want to have a discussion. Look, I’ll be the first to admit how masturbatory this all is. “Listen to me! Listen to what I want to listen to! Oh, the cleverness of me!” I don’t expect you to hang on my every word. If we’re being completely honest, I don’t truly expect you to have read this far. But maybe something’ll catch your eye and you think, “Hey someone else likes that song too!” or “You have got to be kidding me! That is garbage!” Or maybe I turn you on to something you never knew existed. I don’t know. But what I do know is I have had a life long love affair with music, and it’s time I pay it the respect it deserves.
I still love you, music. I hope you still love me.
(* – For the record, they were. And it was.)
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