It's Music...It's Life.

Music. To some people, it’s just there. A pick me up. Something to make the bus ride to school a little less boring. An excuse to shake your body in a crowd of people without being labeled as crazy. A trend, a fad. An excuse to gather with thousands of other people to watch scantily clad blonde girl hump the floor.

But for other people, like me, or maybe like you, it’s something else. I wouldn’t know how to describe its importance to someone if I had to. You either get it or you don’t. You’re either that kid who wants to run a few red lights to get to school, or the kid who wants the bus driver to get lost so they can finish their new playlist.

Music has been the one constant through my life. The genres and the posters on my wall may have been changed once or twice, but I’ve never loved anything more. Like I said, to explain it to a “nonbeliever” would be impossible, but I guess I could try…

It’s when you look back the first 5 years of your life and all you really remember is singing Sam Cooke in the bathtub to your dad as he reads a book. Or your dad catching you dancing to Tom Petty in the living room and whipping out the camcorder. It’s sitting on your front step with your $10 Toys’R’Us guitar and pretending [and starting to believe that you really] are Dolores O’Riordan.

It's being 9 years old and almost breaking your arm when you decide to stage dive from your bed during the opening night of your "bedroom-wide tour", knowing that your adoring fans, aka your stuffed animals, will catch you when during the crescendo of your dramatic opening number, you thrust yourself off the stage and onto the floor. No one caught you. And you're crying on the floor holding your arm, wondering how you will ever explain this to your mother. She doesn't understand how important this dramatic act is to the integrity of your stage show.

It's being that girl. The 12 year old listening to My Chemical Romance in her room while her peers are walking the streets in denim mini skirts sipping $6 frapuccinos. It's watching the walls crash around you and feeling like you have nothing, then finding something to grasp onto. It’s hearing the “Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot” and seeing yourself say these things to your mother when she’s crying in the other room.

It’s that moment when you’re 14 and it’s your first concert. You’re standing in Nassau Coliseum covered in beer, dancing on the stairs. You were supposed to be in the nosebleeds, but you snuck down to the floor. And the old man who’s next to you telling you to move over is blocked out by Adam Lazzara’s voice pulsing through your veins. It’s having a stranger cry on you because you were both just within inches of Tom DeLonge, aka pop/punk GOD.

It’s when 5 months of your life were spent listening to and believing in and defending a boy who never gave a shit either way; when you’ve waited 15 years for the perfect first kiss and you've just shared it with the shittiest person you can think of, and you sit in your room and listen to one of the 4 mixes your best friend made you…the one with a legend which tells you which song to listen to when you wanna cry, when you wanna kill someone, or when you wanna “tap the next boy you see”.

It’s sitting on the train for 2 hours blasting every song in Brand New’s catalog in preparation for what should be the best show of your life. It’s singing into a bottle of Snapple to the smiling family plastered on the wall of the LIRR; seeing Jesse Lacey whimper and whine on stage then drop his guitar off the stage of Madison Square Garden because he had one too many before going on. It’s crying on your friend’s shoulder because you just heard Chris Carrabba sing your favorite song of all time, the one you listened to on those nights when you cried over him, sung live and so beautifully that you have no other choice.

And it’s calling all of your favorite musicians by their first name, like you know them like you know everyone of their lyrics. Staying home on Wednesdays in the summer to watch Warped Wednesday on FuseTV, wishing you were on that bus that smells like sweaty socks and week old pizza, singing to hundreds of people daily in blistering heat, and smelling/looking like a caveman. It’s when you dance alone in your room, and watching this hairbrush become a microphone and the bed behind transform into a drum kit...and playing the Warped Tour in your bedroom.

It’s obsessing over every line of every song on every album and analyzing and writing every breakthrough in your very own music blog, hoping that maybe 5 people will read it, and that maybe 1 of those 5 will read it and find their own truth in it, and maybe even find it somewhat...interesting.

Oh wait…That’s me.
Who are you?