Right Place, Wrong Time
I was just watching Almost Famous, and as always I felt that incurable itch, that unsatiable thirst for something else. I was born in the wrong time. I should have been born 37 years before I actually was. Then, I would have been 18 during the summer of love, and could have gone to Woodstock, and could've lived when music was good, and it was all you needed, and the world was alive.
You can laugh, and call me a hippie, but I feel like I missed my train and ended up at the wrong stop. I love music so much that it hurts. That it gets inside of me until I feel like it is me. The worst part is that those bands that are still touring now charge so much for their tickets that I can't possibly go. So what little of that magic I might have experienced has been snatched away. At least I'll get to see Santana in October, my dad promised. He's seen him play 30 times. And I only get to see the legend once? Can't they understand how much their music means to people like me? And how much it would mean to me to get to hear "Simple Man" live? Or "Hey Jude"? Or "Tiny Dancer"?
As much as I love visual art and try to make my own, I don't think anything can sum up human experience and emotion the way a song can. As proud as I am of my drawings and paintings, when I wrote the music to my first song, it felt more like a part of me than anything I've ever created. I just played it and played it and played it, because it was like I had replicated some part of myself and it was sad and beautiful and powerful. Playing those notes is so intimate. And when I first played it for someone else, and she didn't even know it was song I had written, and she said, 'Oh, Katie, that's so beautiful. It makes me feel so much better about everything. Please keep playing," I knew that this was something that I wanted to do forever. Because my music hadn't just touched me, it had touched someone else. And I've only been playing for two months. Imagine what I could do in my lifetime. There are only two things that I want to accomplish in my life (at this point - I may change my mind like I often do): to become a great musician, and to travel the world. I don't want a career. I don't want a routine. I want to make art and love and live.