When I was in elementary school, I fell in love with music. My dad would bring his record player into the living room and play records by The Beatles or Pink Floyd. I soon grew to love the way vinyl sounded and I always looked forward to the days when I got to see my dad. I looked forward to picking through my dad’s vinyl collection. The majority of the time he would hook up his electrical guitar and play along. I don’t think anyone ever really understood my obsession with vinyl, but something about vinyl just made me feel better. I appreciated the different kind of sound that escaped from the record player compared to the CD player.
When we did listen to the CD player, we often listened to country music. I quickly fell in love with the sweet, gentle voice of Keith Urban and the rebellious sound that came from Gretchen Wilson. My brother listened to a lot of rap music and because of his musical taste I can probably recite from memory most of the words to any old Eminem track. My mom listened to many different artists around us kids. When with my mom, I often heard Duran Duran (My mom’s obsessed), Cyndi Lauper and newer artists such as Nickelback. I developed an appreciation for most genres of music because of my family member’s tastes. When I was in elementary school, I fell in love with music.
When I was in middle school, I began to understand music. My middle school years were some of the most important years of my life. This wasn’t due to the many friends that stood by my side or the memories that I created, but rather it was due to one simple class; choir. I joined choir when I was in seventh grade. At this point in my life, I was struggling. I wasn’t a very happy 12-year-old. Unfortunate circumstances occurred in the last years of elementary school and things began to fall apart at home. I ended up living in a women’s shelter for some time making it difficult for me to get my daily music intake. When I saw my father on the weekends, he no longer brought out the record player and he stopped playing his guitar as much as he used to. He closed down quite a bit from me and my sister and I felt separated from him. I didn’t know how to connect with him anymore. I didn’t feel I had my father’s attention anymore and I craved that more than anything else. Seeing as me and my father had previously connected so much through music, I thought that by joining choir and having my father come to my choir concerts, it would make it easier for us to reconnect. However, I got so much more from choir than a reconnection with my father.
Choir helped me see so many things in a different light. Not only did I learn vocal techniques that helped form me into the singer that I am today, but I learned how to emote what I was singing. My choir director helped our choir learn how to interpret the lyrics that we were singing. She taught us that the more we can feel what we are singing, the better we can sing. She helped me learn how to interpret lyrics in many different ways. I wanted to sing better than anyone else. I wanted to stand out to impress my father so it was very crucial to me that I felt what I was singing so that I was doing so to the best of my ability. I continue to feel what I sing to this day. When I was in middle school, I began to understand music.
When I was in high school, I was obsessed with music. I continued to be a member of the school choir all throughout high school, but it wasn’t just choral music that I obsessed over. I was always keeping my ear open for bands and musicians that I had never heard before. I found punk rock and alternative music my sophomore year of high school. This is when I delved into my goth phase of teenagedom. Everything that these bands sang seemed so raw and vulnerable and other times the lyrics made no sense at all, but I was obsessed with trying to make sense out of them. After my sophomore year I looked into other genres of music and briefly got into hip hop and rap. After that I was back on a country kick thanks to Hunter Hayes. After the country kick, I decided that it was just too hard to pick a certain genre to love. So I loved them all. I listened to anything and everything that I could possibly find. There were definitely songs that I absolutely hated, but there were songs that I connected with as well. My obsession for music made me decide my senior year to go into college a music major. When I was in high school, I was obsessed with music.
My freshman year of college, I fell out of love with music. I went into college stoked to begin my future as a musician. However, choir in college was much different from choir in high school. I was thrown into theory classes with almost no knowledge about music theory. I had to take piano class which stressed me out way more than it should have. I was taking private voice lessons and had nineteen hours of classes my first semester at college. I had several mental breakdowns throughout my first semester and when the semester ended, I was done. I officially hated music. I would still listen to music recreationally, but I didn’t want to be a conductor, a choir teacher or a classical performer for a living. So, what was I doing as a music major?
The stress of majoring in something that I was no longer interested in along with the stress of other events that took place that first year of my college career had me quickly spiraling into a depression. My emotions never slowed down and I let them get the best of me. I was officially depressed. I knew that I needed to make a change in my life and so I took the opportunity to change my major. I still wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life so I temporarily switched my major to elementary education before making the final decision to switch to psychology and go into social work. It was the beginning of my sophomore year that I made the switch to psychology. The switch had me feeling much better about myself and I was happy again for the time being. Most importantly, I could finally listen to music again without becoming a mess of emotions and stress. My freshman year of college, I fell in and out of love with music.
The beginning of sophomore year, music failed me. After months of building myself back into the happy-go-lucky girl that my friends, family, and sorority sisters had come to know me as, my obsession with music continued. I was still depressed, but I learned how to hide it. I didn’t want the depression to shine through because not only was I desperate to become something more than “that depressed girl”, I didn’t want the people that cared about me to worry about me too much. My way of coping with my depression was by listening to music. It silenced, if even for a little bit, the thoughts in my head of ending everything. When I listened to music everything was okay. I would blast music in my car to keep the thoughts of hurting myself at bay.
It was pretty early on in my sophomore year when I was on my way back from practice. I’m on my school’s bowling team and we practice a town over. The drive back to my school is roughly a thirty minute drive. I was driving with the windows down, wind whipping through my hair, music on blast, and I was singing along as loud and obnoxiously as I possibly could when out of nowhere my car radio stopped working. The CD I was listening to had been spit out and refused to go back in. The radio wasn’t kicking on like it should have. I was stuck in silence. I began to panic. I NEEDED my music. I NEEDED the distraction.
About ten minutes of sitting in silence went by when I started to think about everything that had happened that day. My once happy feelings soon became feelings of sadness, hopelessness and anger. The thought ran through my head then that I was on a decently busy highway. Would it really matter to anyone if I pulled the steering wheel and ended these feelings and thoughts for good? At the time, I didn’t think it would matter to anyone. With these thoughts and feelings in mind, I pulled the steering wheel. I had hopes of hitting another vehicle or running my car off the road. I veered into the other lane narrowly missing a car that had been speeding and I had just run off the shoulder when out of nowhere the radio came on. It was as if a bucket of freezing cold water had been dumped over my head and I was just realizing what I had actually done. I quickly slammed on the breaks. My car stopped about two feet away from a tree.
I sat in my car in front of that tree for 30 minutes. I stared at the tree for about ten minutes before I burst into tears. I continued to cry for 20 minutes. The whole time I was parked in front of that tree next to the highway, no one stopped to ask me if I was okay, yet somehow, I knew that I would be. Eventually I made my way back to campus, my radio blasting music as normal. I told a few sisters what had happened and ever since I’ve been trying to get help. The beginning of sophomore year, music failed me, but at the beginning of sophomore year, music saved me as well.
“The function of music is to release us from the tyranny of conscious thought”. This quote sums up everything that I feel about music. Music definitely makes me think, but it takes away all of the negative thoughts that run through my mind and replaces them with positive thoughts. Music makes me a happier person. Throughout my whole life, music has been there in some way. Sometimes I hated it, but the majority of the time, I loved it. I don’t love music because it’s catchy or popular. I love music because it makes me connect. It keeps me alive. I can honestly say that without music in my life, I would be a completely different person than I am today. Music is the basis of which I have formed and this is not true to just me. I know I can’t be the only person out there that music has saved, so I thank all musicians. Musicians get a lot of criticism. Take the criticism with a grain of salt because you never know when your music will come on the radio and stop somebody from ending their life.
