Blessing and curse

When I grew up I remember how some songs gave me goose bumps. I recall how I waited for the long intro to “Afraid To Shoot Strangers” to finish, just to jump right into that magic melody. You all know which one I’m talking about.

Many are the songs, and many are the bands who gave me that feeling of time standing still. Sort of a Larger-than-life experience.

But what happened later is for sure both a blessing and a curse.

When I first started to unlock the secrets to music theory like harmonies, rhythms and everything that you need to know to become a songwriter I wrote riff after riff, solo after solo, song after song like possessed. I constantly surprised myself and I just couldn’t stop. I needed to know everything, and everything I learned was fresh to my ears and I was just so hungry.

When I’d dug deep enough and figured it all out I sort of came to a weird insight in my early twenties. Music was not giving me that Larger-than-life feeling anymore. To me music had now become something that was such a huge part of me that I knew it inside out, be it melodies, rhythm or even production. The magic was gone and the spell had been broken. I had the key to the secret.

There’s an old arabic saying that goes “The carpenters door is always broken”, which I feel I can relate a bit to. I write music, I write lyrics and play instruments, live and in studio with the same passion as when I was a hungry teenager, but when I listen to music – that’s where the curse comes in. It’s so rare I feel the magic that I felt when I was a kid, simply because I know how it’s done down to every little detail. Last ten years there are merly two bands that has given me a glimpse of that feeling, Jethro Tull’s old 70s albums and Judas Priest with Firepower.

Sometimes I wish I never went down the rabbit hole.