I didn't know who The Rolling Stones were until I was far into high school. The first time I heard "Stairway to Heaven", I was nineteen. And I thought Bob Dylan and Bob Marley were the same person for a long, long time.
And that's a very abbreviated list. As a musician, well, that is just downright mortifying. (If you are a musician reading this, you can stop shaking your head at any time. I know, it's bad.) Fortunately, there is a simple explanation for this unfortunate situation.
I love my parents unconditionally, but there is one area in which I was partially deprived as a child. Musically, I was raised on a combination of early 2000's pop music, 90's country music (Think: Achy Breaky Heart), and whatever nursery rhymes set to music my mother deemed acceptable to play on cassette tapes in our minivan. Don't get me wrong, though. There are a few exceptions to this rule. I know the whole "Hotel California" album front to back because my dad would play it at the dinner table some nights. I've heard every Elvis Christmas song ever performed, I'm certain. And I might be the biggest Jim Croce fan alive. It's just that as a little kid, your parents set all of your cultural examples, and it's pretty hard not to follow them until you're much older. Especially when you were a kid who was seriously concerned with parent-pleasing.
In short, music was not a focus for my parents, so it it wasn't for me, either. The result was a person with a very narrow-minded and kind of abhorrent understanding of how music "should" be.
It's quite the wonder that I began teaching myself guitar at thirteen, all things considered. In reality, one day I just picked it up out of the blue, and I haven't set it down since. Once I did, I got the notion that there might be a few musical things that I was missing out on (not that it happened right away, I played horrendous country cover songs for a year or two before I figured anything out). I eventually took the time to learn some music with a little bit more soul, something that contained more than just a one-five-six-four chord progression.
I've been playing for seven years now. Music has kind of consumed my entire existence. I play gigs just about every week in bars and coffee shops and on street corners and anywhere else that will have me, especially in the past two years. I've spent as much of my free time as I can involving myself in the music community in Buffalo. And I've had some amazing experiences come of it. (I could write a thesis on how great being a musician is and how much I love it, but that's for another post.) Without question my knowledge of all aspects of music has increased exponentially in that time. But I can't begin to tell you the number of times I still have to grit my teeth and tell someone that I've never even heard of that song, let alone the artist, and get a genuinely shocked expression staring me down, shaming me into promising to look it up as soon as I get home (And then I always forget, and the vicious cycle continues).
SO! I present to you: the purpose of this extremely long-winded post and the introduction to this blog. I've kept a running list over the years of songs and artists I'm supposed to know, and still don't. The plan is to sit down and listen to all of it, and then write about it. After making music, writing is my next favorite thing to do; this is the best of both worlds. This is actually a project I've been wanting to do for a long time, and now I have a great excuse to do so.
Hence, the title, the "Music Redemption". It's long past time for me to repair my general unintentional ignorance towards "good" music. It's only my favorite thing on the whole planet, after all.
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