death to pillows

This morning I awoke from my action packed killin' dream to me engaging my pillow in a rear naked choke. After about 5 seconds I released my pillow letting it slump, unconscious, onto my bed. My dream about purchasing a fender jaguar (seen to the right) apparently descended somewhere into a dream about stealth combat.

Music is probably the most important thing in my life. Most of my time each day is spent actively listening to music or finding new music, but I spend a good portion every day playing guitar. I'm interested in lots of styles, but I generally have a funky blues-rock sound with influences from jazz and traditional middle eastern music. Currently I play an Epiphone Les Paul that I've just about grown out of. Most of my playing is improvised and although I don't know many other people's songs, I can usually figure it out in less than 5 minutes enough to teach my friends what they'd like to know. I don't play rhythm often, but when I do, I generally go with a different musical direction, like more dreamy ethereal shoegazy stuff. This was really amplified when I found my new favorite band, The Depreciation Guild, which has very shimmery crashing ambient rhythm guitar supporting it.

It's taken a long time for me to 'find myself', both musically and tonally. I was a musical virgin besides classical music until I was 12 years old, and after that I discovered bands through the internet and not from friends. In an effort to expand my musical tastes I accidentally hurt my sense of quality and I had trouble really enjoying music since there wasn't any music that really hurt my ears for a while. I've grown to be more discerning, however, and my songwriting and guitar playing has improved because of it. Because of this, although I support people finding new music, I generally encourage people to formulate deeper opinions about the kinds of music they already listen to before moving on to new types of music. Some people, like my friend Eugene, venture into esoteric cliquey genres like electronica, but I didn't want to get into that. I know that some mainstream music is really good, but I had to develop a greater level of musical awareness than just comfort in order to determine whether or not something is genuinely good.

That sounds stupid, but it's exactly the way I feel about the way I listen to music. Listening to music is a very active process for me. I try to think about each piece of music I listen to, investigating why I like it or don't, and I keep extensive notes about certain pieces I feel the need to pay special attention to. I'll write more about my process and some favorite music later.

For now,