Lyric Essay Draft #1

Some day making noise.

I look at this picture and can’t remember the day it was taken. Frankly I don’t need to. For me it was not the date that is important. All I remember is that I was in the studio with my band, sweating and churning away behind an amplified drum kit trying to make something I can one day be proud of. I remember take after take after take.

The importance of a snapshot in time for me is not the thing that is being captured but the event that is taking place. Many people live there lives through the nostalgia of the pictures they collect. Places, people, events, all immortalized in a single square image. I have been lucky enough to have my memories expanded beyond visual sense. I can relive moments of my life through sound. Yes, I know what your thinking; “we get it, you’re a musician”, but humor me won’t you. When I look back at my life I have an intangible medium in which to rediscover who I was when I recorded a song. When I listen to the jumbled arrangement of a project I made early on in my musical endeavors I can remember exactly where I was and what I was trying to do. “Be more flashy, make something that will make people perk up when they hear it”. I hear my growth as a player and as a person when I backtrack down the auditory landscape of my music. I can jump back and time and laugh at fifteen year old me, trying his hardest to be as clever as John Bonham, or as manic as Ginger Baker. I can jump forward from there and hear the bedrock of my own style coming to bloom. I hear myself hit wood to hide with confidence and clarity. I wince as I flub a fill or accidentally clack a drumstick against the metal rim of a snare drum, but I loosen up when I realize how far I have come and how far I have left to go. Like those who open their yearbook to shake their head at the unrecognizable, acne-ridden, face of their past self, I can sit back and hear a young boy trying to discover himself through art. I can’t help but smile as I listen to him try to make something that he can one day be proud of.