All this time, when we were younger kids, there was a music store not very far from my house.
It was a big music store, and it had a special room that was enclosed. It had glass, but you walked through a special door, and it was soundproof. There were speakers and a turntable to play vinyl LPs. They had headphones too.
The whole room must have been fifteen feet long, with a big waist high shelf full of classical music. Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, that kind of stuff.
Me and my buddy would go down to the Hastings music store, and we would spend hours in there. There were two turntables and two headphones because we were there at the same time.
Whoever put in that music room really loved classical music and had a heart for other people to explore it. He was also smart, because classical music is difficult. You have different composers and different orchestras playing the same piece. So if you are very particular about hearing your Mozart piano concerto number whatever, you are going to want the composer, the orchestra, or the piano player that you choose.
Nevertheless, there was hardly ever anybody in there. I do not remember but a few times anyone being in there except for me and my buddy.
That room mattered to me because learning an instrument is only one part of becoming musical. The other part is listening.
Classical music was different from the songs I was trying to learn on guitar. It was not just verse and chorus. It moved in a bigger way. It rose and fell. It carried sadness, beauty, mystery, and silence. I did not have to understand the structure to feel it.
I would sit and listen, and I was not just hearing melodies. I was hearing movement. I was hearing the way one section could create tension and another section could release it. I was hearing that music could be a journey, not just a song.
That listening room widened my idea of what music could be.
A guitar song could be intimate. A piano could be personal. But classical music showed me something bigger. It showed me that music could carry a whole world inside it. It could be emotional without explaining itself.
Later, when I wrote simple songs on guitar, I think some part of me still wanted them to carry more than just the chords themselves. I wanted the feeling underneath. I wanted the atmosphere. I wanted the movement from one emotional place to another.
For me, the sound was already speaking. The lyrics came later and tried to catch up.
Then, when I was in high school, there was a college bookstore right up the street from my house. It had used books and used record albums. Students could come in and sell their old records.
I remember there was a stack of albums that were a dollar each. I think they were a dollar each if you bought three. This was a long time ago.
I had no idea who these bands were. I brought home Black Sabbath’s first album, Led Zeppelin IV, which is called Sticks, and the very first Rush album, the one that did not have Neil Peart on it.
I brought home three rock bands from the 70’s and put them on my little plastic vinyl turntable.
All my classical albums were intermixed with this.
That opened my mind to a whole other world of music.
So there were all these sounds coming together in me. There was the piano from when I was little. There was the purple Hondo guitar. There was the poetry and writing in notebooks. There was the classical music room at Hastings. Then there were those used rock records: Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Rush.
I was not being trained into a system. I was being drawn by sound.
Drawn by emotion.
Drawn by instruments.
Drawn by the mystery of how a few notes could change the way a room felt.
I did not have a straight road into music. I had scattered pieces. But they were powerful pieces. A piano. A guitar. A notebook. A listening room. A few cheap records from a used bookstore.
Those things collected inside me.
Later, people may ask where a song came from. But a song may have been forming for years before it was written.
That is how it was for me.
The songs came from many places before I ever really understood what was happening.
Read Chapter 4: The Stratocaster, and the Four-Track Recorder — The Story of Ailie Mae