You all probably know this stuff about me, but isn't it fun when you get an assignment for school to write about your favorite thing in the world?
Music is very important to me in my life. When I was a child, I was exposed to the music my family liked, much of which was from the radio. My dad loved rock music and my brother loved pop music. I didn’t consider myself a real music fan until I was 12. That was when I discovered a Norwegian pop rock artist named Sondre Lerche whose music I loved. His music explores a variety of genres, including folk, jazz, and experimental, so I think it was an excellent starting point to introduce me to lots of genres that I hadn’t considered listening to before. I made accounts on music websites like Spotify and made a lot of discoveries through them.
My personality at that time urged me not to follow what everyone else liked, so I spent many months mostly listening to obscure artists. When I was 13, I started looking into the artists who inspired all my other favorite songs, so I started listening to slightly bigger names like Kate Bush, Bjork, Sonic Youth, and Joni Mitchell. This was also when I realized I really liked experimental music. The term was completely unfamiliar to me until then. I found it weird that experimental music was so great, and that it clicked with me immediately, but it’s so far removed from pop culture that most people don’t even know what it is. The world of experimental music is so vast and interesting, but it doesn’t seem like the larger culture of art appreciation values learning about it and preserving its presence in our lives as much as they do for other art forms. Regardless, I was happy to discover experimental subgenres like ambient, glitch, and noise rock. These genres felt like a special secret for me to discover, and it made me feel unique. But I also love all kinds of other genres like folk, electronic, jazz pop, and indie rock.
As I got older, I joined more online music communities and continued to discover more artists and albums. I also met lots of people through Discord that were making their own music, and I started to feel inspired to finally make my own music. I had been interested in singing for a long time and I had performed in several musicals, so I felt like I had some talent there. When I was 17, I finally picked up the guitar my dad had bought me years ago and started to teach myself how to play it. Months later, I was comfortable writing songs and recording them. I made a few rough demo drafts of albums that I hope to improve in the future. I don’t take my music too seriously right now, and my level of production is very humble, but I hope that sometime I will be able to go farther with it.
Music has only increased in importance for me as time goes on. Following what some of my music fan friends do, I now listen to new albums every day and rate how much I like them out of 10, and sometimes write reviews of them. I listen to over 24 hours of music per week on average. It’s overwhelming because I don’t re-listen to a lot of the stuff I find except the ones that really blow my mind. But this routine also helps me feel like I’m making progress in exploring the seemingly endless world of great music, and being able to highly value my favorite albums.
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