Tuesday, July 3, 2012

How Seven Songs Taught Me to No Longer Hate Music

Posted by on Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 12:30 PM

Thats not me in the picture, but the caption given in Google image search was, Dishelved girl with laptop, neck pain, so I thought itd work.
  • What comes up when you type, "Dishelved girl with laptop, neck pain" in Google image search.
If someone would've told me before moving to New York that in a few short years I'd help book a music festival in Brooklyn, I wouldn't have believed them, though I'd have appreciated the guileless confidence. While having a role in the Northside Festival is still a pleasant shock to my system, a weird thing happens during the six months leading up to it. From January to June, the fangirl inside of me—the one who paraded around in a Green Day t-shirt as a very proud 11-year-old and treated her cassette of The Blue Album as if it were the Holy Grail—goes dormant. For the most part, amidst the chaos and stress of booking the festival, listening to new music becomes a chore. Bands are boiled down to price tags and the exact amount of tickets they can sell. It's a scary feeling, not just because part of my livelihood depends on connecting to songs and being able to morph those feelings into words, but because my identity, or at least self-identity, is so closely tied to loving music. It's who I am: girl from Ohio who really, really likes Arcade Fire.

When I come out the other end — that's today, my first day back to blogging! thanks for reading! — there's a hot, panicky, eight-week period full of blank text documents, fumbling with sentences, and not knowing what to write about. This year, rather than enduring mild panic attacks and maybe (definitely) a few tears, I'm combating the situation head-on. I spent the past two days spending time with as many of the albums I missed over the last few months as possible, learning to listen in a way that doesn't make me wonder if I should've really been an English teacher this whole time, like my Mom periodically suggests. There's good news for anyone who's ever doubted being a fan: All it took was seven songs.

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