My Muse

I come from a family of musicians. My mother is a professionally train choir singer and my dad can play guitar and sing pretty decently as well despite lack of training. My grandfather from my mothers side had a local band that would perform and win every "battle of the bands" contest they entered. My grandfather from my father's side can play guitar and accordion while missing a thumb, he can hold the guitar pick with the nub where his thumb used to be, its quite impressive to see. Then there's me, the guy with the passion for writing with nothing to write about, and a love for singing who was bullied so hard in school he never sang for fear of drawing more attention to himself. For the longest time I have been nervous about singing. I've told myself I'm not good enough, that my mid range is garbage, I high range is barely passable and my low range has no control so it feels almost monotone. I also used to write poetry but I hadn't been inspired by anything in a very long time. Then I meet my girlfriend.

She makes me want to be better than I was, and better than I am. She makes me want to push myself every day to improve. She gave my life meaning again and has filled me with inspiration. I've written probably 4 or 5 poems since being with her for less than a year. Either being about my love and admiration for her, or about me expressing my mental state to her. As for singing, I haven't held back my voice for her. When I find a song that expresses how I feel I boot up Audacity and get to work. Usually taking multiple takes until I like it. Most recently I had found both an acoustic cover and a piano cover of a song on YouTube, recorded their audio, and did harmonizing vocals. Spent HOURS on it, which is something I've never had the passion to do.

I've had my professionally trained choir singer mother look over my projects I'm working on and give me her opinion and her advice. If she had any suggestions I'd make tweaks. I even wrote an original song for my girlfriend expressing how I feel in regards to my mental state and our relationship, and how I want to keep pushing myself to be better for her. I titled it "Work in Progress". I've been sending my recordings to my friends and have been taking pride in my singing, which is something I haven't done since I was 7 or 8 years old. I have such a passion for singing and writing and I've finally found my muse, my thing that drives me to spew my heart onto a page like I am doing right now. She's actually the reason why I joined Vocal, to enter contest after contest and keep writing and get better and better. When I finally win one of these writing contests I'm using the prize money to purchase a plane ticket and I'm going to start my life with her.

The things I'll be inspired to write and sing when we live together... I can't even begin to imagine. Hell I might even start playing guitar again, or teach myself how to create music with multiple instruments using programs like Mixcraft or FLStudio instead of only knowing how to sing. I have all this ambition, all these wants but never put the effort in to actually making something from it. I'm spending some time focusing on myself and figuring out who i am and who i want to be, and I'm hoping once i got that figured out i'll be able to start moving forward with my music.