Music is weird. It meant absolutely nothing to me until around when I hit high school, when suddenly music was a huge percentage of my time and life. I joined four or five different bands and a few choirs, performed and practiced constantly… but didn’t discover pop music until my first year of university, when there was a little program called “Napster” or something like that which allowed the masses to download as much music as they wanted.
Turns out that I wanted a lot of music. My collection sprawled into thousands of songs, tens of thousands, so much music that I rarely heard the same song more than once a month despite listening almost non-stop.
And then around the time I joined the workforce (reluctantly, granted) music kind of slipped from my regular life and exclusively into my social life. I had more rhythm games than you could shake a stick at… Dance Dance Revolution (“DDR”), Amplitude, Guitar Hero, Karaoke Revolution, and eventually Rocksmith (which came with a real guitar!)… and then into actual guitar lessons, which I’ve been taking for years now.
I’m still a mediocre guitarist… and I suspect I always will be, but I can play chords and easy riffs and stuff like that.
These days I almost exclusively listen to music when I’m writing, and I try to match the style of what I’m writing to the music itself. I listen to Skyrim’s soundtrack a lot, or the entire Star Wars audio anthology… stuff that doesn’t have lyrics is best. These days a lot of the music I listen to is cyberpunk (and some of it is from the video game “Cyberpunk 2077” which I haven’t played but does pop up constantly for searches of cyberpunk music).
Today… today I might go listen to a few DDR songs, just for old time’s sake.
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!