There is something beyond passion in me

When I was around the age of 7 or 8 years old, I was in the UK staying at my cousin's house, and she had this beautiful piano in the dining room which she was learning on. I had also been learning piano since the age of 4, but being so little, it felt to me more like homework than it did a hobby that could grow into something more essential to me. We sat down and we wrote a little song, using the simplest chord progression known to man! 

Just then, something had clicked in my head, and in my heart. I had become infatuated with writing. With the added fact that I was a mischievous kid, I got TV taken away from me a lot and that being said, forced to read, so literature became a force of habit, and then a will. So moving from little Dork Diaries books all the way to mythology, history, fantasy, poetry and books that I still love with all my heart to this day! (Shameless mention of "The Problem with Forever", "A Thousand Boy Kisses" and "The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth" which I've probably read 8 times in my life now..? If you want to see more books I adore, I'm making a list of my favs in a different tab a little later on!) 

I loved reading, and even more I loved learning such fantastical words! That evolved into a love much larger than most things - I mean, the ability to have rhyme and rhythm all in the same thing was so fun, and not everything to me had to make sense one at a time, as long as it made sense all together... Does that make sense?

Music, and the ability to put pen to paper and for it to mean something completely different to me than it did to my mother or father was so magical and special. That only someone who was in my realm or universe could understand. I suppose that's why music is universal, the way in which one thing can mean so many other things infinitely to other people.

It's found in trees, burrowed away in electrical signals, and their physical rings, transformed into real melodies when people hook 'em up right. It's found in the birds, to communicate safe passage, warning, happiness, grief. It's in the littlest things like the lesser water boatman, a (really really cute) water insect that sings to find its partner in the puddles behind our house or in the streams to a river. And the best part about it all, it's connected us through hardships and built communities on nothing but hope that beauty in the world will persevere. Enough on my rambling about where music can be found and how wondrous it is. 

I found, sitting in that dining room with my cousin, writing a little song called "Melodies", a purpose in life that felt like nothing ever did. It continued to grow, it continued to bellow into this massive need to write and to say all my feelings without needing to directly translate to "I'm sad" or "I feel this and that".

It could be phrased like "And I built a slum out of my soul, right beneath the floorboards,
for all the selves I couldn't be anymore,
they slept softly... -Admittedly" or "They close the lid and everyone leaves. I stay behind with what’s left of me... -One In The Casket, One Unfamiliar" It all gave me the instrument (haha get it) to take the ordinary English language, and make something with 10 times the amount of meaning, with thousands of different ways it could be interpreted. 

But even through all this love and passion and admiration for the craft of writing, one can become stuck with it all. I went through a slump of writing for around a year, between early 2022 to late 2023, where nothing seemed to click - no rhymes, no meaning, no soul, no life stories felt good enough to be told. There was only one thing I could really do in that state, and it was to listen to the things around me. To revisit all of my favourite albums and singles and things in life (like the birds in the trees) that made sense musically. I went back to Joni Mitchell, to Adrianne Lenker, to Fiona Apple and Lizzy McAlpine. I went all the way back to The Beatles and Radiohead. I went to the roots of what inspired me. The more I sat and absorbed their art, the more I realised again why writing and playing wasn't just something they did, it was something they were glued to.

And then my love for the guitar grew more and more! I'd listen to these discographies of Joni and Hozier and realise that often, their instruments did a lot of the storytelling themselves. I fiddled with alternate tunings, and then that transformed my writing into something deeper. If you have synesthesia like I do, I would describe it as something going from this light mint green all the way into this beautifully complicated dark blue. An entire world was found, an entire purpose was created for me.

Lyrically yours, Mei x