My Family & Music

My family has a mixed relationship with music. My grandfather and aunt were and are musicians and singers. I am a singer. My brother plays the guitar. However, my parents are different. My dad has always been a lover of music and has given the guitar many (semi-successful) attempts, whereas my mom really just listens to the same 10 songs because she likes the words. Though our parents may not be the biggest musicians, my brother and I are deep into it.

My brother and I have always been extremely close, it's hard not to be when you go through your entire life together. He has always been the type to become completely obsessed and immersed in something for about three months and then completely move on, but rock and roll is the only one that has stuck around. It is so cool to have a brother that is as passionate about music as I am and who I can talk to about any genre or artist in depth for hours on hours. I love classic rock as much as the next person, but he has such a deep connection to all of these great artists that I honestly envy. I can see it in the way he talks about them. He really connects with the music of a past generation more so than the music of his own and I think that says something about people in general when someone 40 years younger than an artist can feel so passionately about their art and words that it truly hits them and makes them feel a part of something bigger. I think thats one of the things I love most about music.

As I have written about before, I moved to the UK this past year. Growing up, my dad used to play Scottish bagpipe songs and tell us tales of when he went traveling in the eighties and I tend to think this sparked a sense of adventure in me as well. He would play me songs and tell me about how this was the one he listened to when he was on a ferry to the Isle of Skye and met an Italian man that he ended up hanging out with for 2 days. Or play some punk rock jam and tell me how it sparked his memory of when he was hacking down a piece of the Berlin Wall. Stories like this made me want to explore and they were all surrounded by music in my mind. There are so many songs that I love now just because they remind me of an event or a time period in my life.