Why Music?

When people ask me how or why I stay within the music industry when I have openly confessed it to be the most abusive relationship of my life, I can answer this question with ease. It is who I am to my core. I am dedicated to the things and people who breathe life and inspiration into me and music will always be at the top of the list. I am a painfully determined person who doesn’t quit easily and when the one thing in the world happens to often be a cruel little bitch, the flipside of this (record reference wink wink) is the Mount Everest like joy music gives me.

Music makes sense to me in ways that very few other people or things do. I started learning my way around the business side of music around the same time I began seriously collecting records and this is also around the same time I began playing music as well. From age 16 there was home, family, school, friends, work, and music and when I moved away from home at age 18, music overlapped and intertwined with every part of my life. 

I worked full-time at a small indie record store. My friends were all music obsessed and either played in bands or played some role in the indie music world. My first live-in boyfriend taught me how to play guitar (as well as my other roommate) and our private time together was usually spent writing songs, seeing bands play live, or listening / buying records. It might sound painfully limited and dull to most people but to a music fanatic like me, there was no other life to live or path to pick. I have many other passions and interests but none own me and thrill me the way music continues to. It isn’t any longer a job or even an industry to me, it is, to put it simply, my way of life.

So while the business side of music seems to be in an eternal downward spiral and more and more people ask why in the world anyone would risk attaching themselves to such a turbulent partner, just think of the people like me. Stupid? Maybe. Crazy? I have been called worse. Wealthy? Not even close. But when your life’s work is a passion that ignites your every breath , I would take that deep level of personal satisfaction over just about anything else in the world.