The Impact
We all have that one place where we feel total comfort. All your fears, stresses, and worries disappear. The world vanishes from around you and you find yourself transported through a feeling you can’t describe. Something you think about every day. Something that changed your life piece by piece and all at once at the same time.
For me, it’s music. Every time I find myself in front of a piano, I can’t help but sit down and play. Every time I sing it feels like I’ve grown wings and I could go anywhere I wanted.
How It Started
My journey started when I a kid. I started singing in a choir in grade 1, and started taking piano lessons in grade 2. After a few years I wanted to quit piano, but I got a phone call from the mother of one of my friends, and she told me that she couldn’t bear to watch me quit because music just flowed out of me.
The next year at my recital, I sang the song Speak Life by TobyMac, and this older woman who I didn’t know came up to me and told me it was the most beautiful thing she had heard in a long time.
I don’t think I truly began to understand the power that music holds until it was the only thing I had left.
Falling In Love with the Broken Pieces
A couple years ago, I fell into a deep hole of nothing. I felt nothing. I understood nothing. I did nothing. I would lie in bed all day, and eat only when my parents sat me down at the table. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t be ok. I was just empty. Nothing.
And then I discovered music in a whole new way. I still remember listening to the song ‘Somebody Else’ by Katelyn Tarver. The song put the emotions I had been feeling in words. I could grasp what they meant, and I could understand what they were. It was as though the lyrics of the music I was listening to opened up a window to my soul, and I could finally see again.
My coping became walking and listening to music. I would imagine the day that I could go out into the world and make my own music. Perform for people. Make others feel the way so many artists had made me feel. And that started a whole spark in me.
Getting It Out There
I bought basic recording equipment, and started producing tracks on our shared family computer. Eventually it became too much, so I had to get a real job to buy my own.
From there I started releasing as many songs as I could. I went back and looked through all the songs I had written in the years, and began producing them.
They were bad at first. In fact, they were downright terrible. I had no idea what I was doing, but I knew that it made me happy. I knew that, the feeling of joy I experienced when I sang into the 40$ Amazon microphone I was using, was something I could never explain.
The night I released my first song, I was sitting in my dad’s old basement office eating chips I grabbed from the pantry, and drinking a ginger ale that had probably been sitting in the fridge for years. I was all alone because no one wanted to stay up till midnight with me. But I was happy. For the first time in about a year, I was happy. And I knew that I wanted to feel that for the rest of my life.
Right Now
Now, I’m working on an album. An album filled with songs about how I got through some of toughest moments in my life. An album that shows the darkest parts of my journey, along with the most beautiful parts. An album that I just might hear sung back to me one day, by people who feel the same way I do.
Sophie