It took me a while to figure out what I wanted to spend the next few months blogging about.  I have a lot of random and different interests.  Like many people, my biggest loves are sports and music.  Sports were a huge part of my life growing up, especially baseball, basketball, and skateboarding.  I’m a huge fan of the New York Giants and the New York Yankees.  I could watch MLB games all day, every day and never get tired of it.  However, I decided that instead of just writing extremely biased posts about how much I hate the Red Sox and The Patriots like some sort of prejudiced Chris Chase article, I would focus my blog more towards music.

I wanted to create a space to share lyrics, songs, and musicians that are on my mind.   Old, new, popular or underground, I listen to a lot of different stuff.  Most of us can’t go a single day without listening to music; it’s in everything and around us all the time.    

I guess this will be a space for me to talk about lyrics (or poetry) that make my brain hurt… or possibly just a great song with an amazing story behind it.   I’ve always had a huge love for music that makes me think.  When I was younger, a few of my best friends had a dinky little jam band.  Since I wasn’t much of a performer, I began just helping out with the audio/tech and song-writing aspects.   We were your typical crappy high-schooler garage band, nothing special; but we had some great times and made some amazing memories by simply sharing our minds through poetry and words.   We’d always feel like Jim Morrison after we wrote a really profound verse and we’d just nod and look at each other with an expression that said, “Yeah… that’s deep, man.”

So, the next time you’re driving to class belting out your new favorite song, maybe take a minute to think about what the lyrics mean.  Not necessarily what the lyrics mean to the artist who wrote them, but what they mean specifically to you.  Think about what’s being said, and maybe even what you can learn from it.  That’s what I’ll be sharing in this weekly blog.  Music is an art form, and every single piece of music is interpreted differently by different people.   So while I’ll be sharing mine and other’s opinions on certain songs, take it with a grain of salt, and feel free to draw and share your own conclusions about what story you think is being told.

 

Remember, the best songs are the ones that mean something to you.  The ones that have a message or maybe just make you think about things in a new way.   These are the songs that I want to talk about in this blog.  I also might delve into the connections between different genres of music and skating (skatepunk, surf rock, etc).   On that note, I'll leave you with a short skate video of my friend Andrew (A.J.).   He's the guy that got me into skating when I was younger and was kind of like an older brother until he enlisted in the Army and got shipped out to the sandbox.  

Thanks for reading and don’t hesitate to share your own thoughts or musical preferences.  I hope you enjoy.  Peace,

-Shannon