John Lennon Essay Contest: How Music Has Changed My Life

Music is like your first love (the only difference being you never have to break up). You are shy at first but you work at getting to know her better. You find ways to communicate, and build up from there. You sometime feel so close that you can see inside each other and be the ultimate duo joined as one.

This might seem like too much of a persona for something such as music, but I disagree. I look back at music and how it has affected me and that, along with everyone else's personal story, is what gives music its personality.

I stumbled onto music, almost by chance. Music that had any importance to me, that is. Of course there was the music listened to by my parents, but is needless to say that after growing up hearing it( hearing my dad trying to harmonize whiny vocals with namesake Bob Dylan was the worst) it loses its effect and only draws moans of "not that track again." There was also my refusal to join choir, or any other musically expressive art form. I guess I felt the need to be musically reclusive, which probably spawned from my family's over-zealousness towards music.

The first incidents of me exploring music on my own happened in the dark retreat of my room. I was a bored ten or eleven year old messing around with a CD player, for which I owned very few CDs, if any at all, and I turned the radio switch on. I listened to a couple different stations, and within those first few songs I laid the foundations of my listener's taste.

The next big step in my musical journey came a few years later when I decided I wanted to make the jump from just being a passive listener to something more, a performer. When nobody was in the house (I was still a little shy with the musical expression) I would go into my mom's room and pick-up her old acoustic Gibson and try to play it. I was bad, and that guitar's action was so high it gave my novice fingers blisters, but nevertheless I would strum out the one E minor chord I knew repeatedly to my heart's content. That was true music to me.

I continue to learn about music to this day and all of her intricacies. Our relationship has held steadfast and we no longer keep it in the dark. An iPod that never sleeps, tapping out a drum beat in class, band gear, guitar always handy, staff paper littering my floor: all of these things are signs of music's everyday influence on me.

Music has shaped culture and also has shaped lives. This can be looked at as a good thing and a bad thing, but it had been able to do these things is because it allows for a person's expression of an idea or feeling in its most virgin and pure form. Because music is stripped down to basic feelings and universal themes at its best, people are able to recognize and identify with it. It definitely has shaped me, the full extent of which I cannot quite formulate onto paper, just the small and big things like looks, people who I associate with, and hobbies. Music has changed me and my life, and my ultimate goal is to maybe one day give a little back and leave my print by changing music.

Dylan Logan Thomas