Finding my voice

The past few months, I've probably been listening to more music than ever before. I almost always have something playing in the background while I'm working, while I'm cleaning, and even sometimes while I'm falling asleep.

Every now and again I'll be listening to a random assortment of music when a song comes on that really speaks to my soul. It starts out being something that I just want to listen to over and over again. Then I want to sing it in the shower at the top of my lungs. Then I want to recreate it. I want to put my touch on it, no matter how amateur that touch may be. I want to make it my own; I want to express, through the same medium, the feelings it evokes in me. So then I sit down at my computer and pull up the recording program and try a few times to get it to sound right. But without fail, anytime I try and sing a song written by someone else, I'm at least a little bit disappointed.

I'm finally realizing that disappointment comes because I haven't been trying to sound like myself. I am always, at some level, trying to mimic the original artist, and let's face it--that's just not gonna happen. And frankly, I am figuring out that I don't actually want it to.

This realization has led me to set a kind of lofty goal for myself this year: I am going to write a song so I can find my voice.

I don't expect the lyrics to be particularly deep or moving. I don't expect the music to be anything complex or spectacular. I definitely don't expect to have any incredible instrumentation, because all I really have access to right now is my guitar, and I can't do anything fancy with that. All I know is that it's going to be for my voice (whatever that is), in my style (whatever that is), and from my heart, and think I know what that is, so that's a good start, right?

So yeah. Look forward to hearing my real voice sometime this year!