by Ben VanBuskirk of Blackout Orchestra
I can’t talk about music.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. I have the language. I can talk about what a particular song means to me, or I can talk about what that drummer is doing on the hi-hat that makes you know it’s them. Music history is an easy one – I’ve devoured all the rock bios, read all the critical analysis, seen all the interviews. I eat, sleep and breathe music. So why does it feel hard to talk about?
Not to sound all new-age about it, but music is elemental. Larger than life. When I was a kid, like most kids, I was into superheroes. The bright colors, the high stakes, the every moment of a story that meant something important to the larger narrative. As I grew up, music was the only “adult” thing that felt that exciting, that vital, that universal and yet intensely personal.
So of course I became a musician.
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The shortest version of this story is I drove 8 hours to watch my dad die and then wrote a song about other things. Also here is a picture of my mom’s dog and I. It seems to make that first sentence sting a little less.