Sunday, October 14, 2007

I Dig Music

Yep, for those who have seen Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, this blog is named after Russell Hammond's acid-induced exclaimation from the roof-top, before he jumped into the pool . His first choice was "I'm on drugs!", but since this will be my outlet for anything to do with music, the title I chose seems more appropriate.

I have loved music all of my life, but over the last couple of years it has become a passion (some would say obsession). Without getting into details, I've been suffering from an undiagnosed illness for the past 4 or 5 years that, while not life threatening, severely limits my energy reserves, and in turn, my activities. One of the main issues is that I often feel light-headed and/or dizzy after exerting myself at all, which at times even prevents me from reading effectively (so you'll have to excuse some of my grammatical missteps as well!).

Initially I fell into the TV-trap, and it was sucking my soul, lemme tellya. Then one night my wife and I were out at a club and a woman approached us and asked if she recognized me as the singer of a local band. She wasn't the first person to mistake me for a musician. Over the years I've had to disappoint many folks who were convinced that I had talent! One drunken guy just refused to believe my claims to the contrary, and insisted on buying my buddy and I a pitcher of beer. At that point I gave in, and we told him many fictitious stories about my debauchery of groupies while we enjoyed his gift. As always, fantasy is just so much more fun than reality!

In any case, it seems this last time was the catalyst that would transform at least a small part of that fiction into reality. I decided, boom, like that (sorry couldn't resist plugging in one of my favourite Knopfler tunes), that I wanted to learn to play guitar. For my next birthday, my lovely wife bought me an acoustic, and with the help of the internet I began teaching myself to play. Two years and two additional guitars later, and I'm still having a blast almost every time I pick one of them up. In addition to the obvious satisfaction of learning to play an instrument, the bonus prize has been the drastic widening of my musical tastes. I'm much more open to actually listening to various types of music now, whereas in the past I was prone to being prejudicial and/or shallow in my tastes. It's very freeing to give up the notion that the artist is duty-bound to keep us happy with the entirety of their work!

To wrap things up, the plan is to use this blog to write about the "new" music in my life. That obviously includes recent releases, but also all of the fine music I either overlooked, or simply didn't have access to in the past.