“Letting go is a process.“
Hayley Williams
I have always wanted to be around music. It was like a possession; I needed it constantly, like oxygen, I always had my cd player on me with the cd I was obsessing over the most, or the one I needed the most in the moment, or the mix tape I had burned with the mishmosh of songs that were keeping me going that day, that week. I needed new music to listen to, I needed access to the escape it provided to me at all times.
The reason you’ll see A LOT of mention of Paramore on this blog is because Paramore is the band I credit with cementing music as my reason for being, and also for being the reason I chose to live. It sounds heavy; to rest this on a band, people who in all reality are strangers to us. But I was a kid whose parents were going through a horrible divorce in the wake of my father’s drug and alcohol addiction which continued to rip a whole through my life. I had lost so much, I was actively losing so much. Paramore came along and sparked a a relief so deep, fulfilled a need to be seen so physically, so vividly, that my life basically changed overnight.
I remember distinctly the day I got a Decaydance/Fueled By Ramen cd sampler (cd samplers were the GOAT back then; gave you a taste of a lot of bands without having to buy the cd for each of them. Today I thank gods for Spotify). I heard Emergency that day when I pushed the sampler into my car’s cd player; with my mouth hanging open at the very first note, I craved to know more of this band with a woman as the lead singer. It sounds trite now, but in 2005/2006, this was revolutionary for me. As a girl at the time who was navigating the scene, the misogyny was worse than ever. One day I’ll talk more about what I saw Hayley herself have to deal with in this scene, but for now, suffice to say I believe we had similar experiences.
I always thought I would have a career in music from that moment on. Not necessarily in playing – I really (despite 2 years as a classical guitar major) have never gotten that good at any particular instrument. But what I wanted was to be in the industry somehow, like as an A&R Director, tour manager, or the tour bum who loads in the drums every night. I’d slum it (and have, once before) anyway I had to to experience the wonderful feeling of touring, of waking up in a new city every day, of being cleansed by music every night.
The end game, the way I was involved in music, with music, was largely immaterial – I loved the idea of all of it; of taping down cables on stage before a gig, or sniping a slew of portable bathrooms before Warped Tour while volunteering for Fearless Records, to working a merch booth, to getting stranded in a hot and humid Texas, our van broken down at a rest stop before we even reached the first date of our tour. As long as I was around the music, I knew my life was on the right path.
I have thought long and hard about what I could realistically do in music – nothing I’ve tried has panned out – and I guess I realized a lot of that had to do with life circumstances and also my overall effort in trying to make it happen, like really happen. So here I am, I started an Instagram, a TikTok and now a blog to make it really happen. Well, or to try. To make something happen.
I have years worth of pictures, videos and memories dating back to the early 2000’s. I guess I realized in the past couple of years – and maybe it has something to do with emo coming back with a new generation (I’m sure I’ll write about that at some point) – that this is history now. Bands are doing 15, 20 year album tours, broken up bands are reuniting around the millennial nostalgia of a generation that just needed something to give them hope, many turning to emo and the adjacent genres and finding as we enter our thirties and beyond that we aren’t so far away from that emo kid we were in high school, after all. And all the fear that not enough has changed.
So this is my history. And by extension, it’s the history of bands, genres, concerts, ridiculous band t-shirts, going to venues and camping for physical tickets, burning mix tapes for your friends, music festivals, scene drama, message forum gossip, and also, if you’re reading this, have stuck around this whole time and are even mildly interested in visiting another page of this site – I imagine a part of your history too.
This Band Is My life 