Daily Writing Prompt: What’s a song that changed your life?
Music has always been a major player in my life.
I remember being a child, in my room playing with my toys. 5 disc CD changer on to set the scene for my toy town.lol
One of my favorite toys as a child was a plastic guitar. My father just began his training to be an IT Engineer, so late nights I would serenade him, making “off beat noise with my little guitar”, while he typed away at his computer in his little office under the stairs.
I remember my cousins came to spend the summer with us and one day I woke up from a great nap and found little tiny pieces of plastic all around the room. I followed the trail and to my horror they cut the strings of my plastic guitar into a million little pieces. My second favorite toy was my Stretch Armstrong. I had the red stretch convertible to go with it.
Stretch Armstrong was also chopped to bits. I cried for the whole day and sworn off guitar for a few years and switched to drums.lol 😭
By age 8 I started forming my own music identity. I remember my father gave me my first, “nu-metal” cd. It was Static X.lol That opened the doors for me to explore music that was different then what I typically heard. By High School my music identity was solid.
It is difficult to name just one song because I would say it was an entire genre that changed my life. Hardcore Music.
New Jersey had a large hardcore scene. My High School would sponsor “Battle of the Bands” every summer. I went to a Performing Arts High School and I was the go-to Lighting Engineer for all the majors except TV Production.
One year I was practicing with Instrumental for their end of the year show and these kids played Atreyu’s “Lip Gloss and Black”. They killed it and I thought, “Wow, I gotta check this band out!”. When the kids noticed I liked it, one of them made me a mixtape of their favorite bands. It included : E-Town Concrete, Slipknot, Mudvayne, Misery Signal, Slayer, and KILLSWITCH ENGAGED.
The Fry Vocals of the OG lead singer from Killswitch Engaged blew my mind. How could he get his voice to sound like that! I spent my High School years working on my Fry Vocals. By this time I added Electric Guitar to my collection and would spend hours after school pounding my guitar and screaming at the top of my lungs. God Bless my mother for putting up with it, she would just walk by when I was done and say, “You sound good sweetie”.🤣 Talk about music therapy. By the end of a scream session you will have no cares in the world.lol
‘Underoath’ was my anchor band. Unbeknownst to me, a lot of the bands I liked at the time were Christian Hardcore/Metal Bands. They expressed all the internal teenage angst and existential questions of life.lol They led me to other ‘Drum Forward’ bands like “As I Lay Dying” and “Bleeding Through”. They had those crazy double bass drum kits with a million pads and they would go crazy.
‘The Mars Volta’ changed the way I listened to music. They use so many instruments, its like you catch a different underlying melody every time you listen. They led me to other bands like, “The Sound of Animals Fights”, the name says a lot lmao and oddly enough, “Circa Survive”.
Between the ages of 20-21 I worked at ‘The House of Blues’. I worked with my best friend Jack and we made friends with one of the security guards so we could see free concert. We got to see, ‘Avenged Sevenfold’, with ‘Bullet for My Valentine’ and ‘Escape the Fate’ as openers. That was an awesome time. I remember we would take day trips to Philly just to hang out and eat food and on the way I would have the top down on my convertible, music on blast, as we belted out our favorite songs from those same bands.
That was a whole era, I believe I actually have a rare photo from that time.
I thought I was so cool. 🤣🫠
All of this to say, not just one song changed me but a whole genre saved my life.
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