I was 11 years old, fresh off of a move from Japan and my Canadian elementary school teachers were warning me about climate change. About global warming. The substitutes were playing An Inconvenient Truth during class to pass the time. They were making us read about the holes in the ozone layer and the melting ice caps. They were lecturing us on rising sea levels and quickly depleting fish populations in our oceans. They were handing us pop-quizzes on worsening natural disasters. I was worried. “What would we do?” I thought. “How will we survive? We don’t have much time left.” This worry consumed me. It haunted me. It’s all I wanted to talk about at the dinner table.
My climate anxiety got so bad that one night I woke up, mid REM, in a cold sweat. I couldn’t bear it any longer. I grabbed my guitar, a pen, and some paper and started writing. Crafting. Brewing. Expressing. By the morning, I had written my first ever composition. I dubbed it, “Why?”, an emphatic questioning of our tendency to disrespect mother nature. The chorus repeated the line, “why, oh why, oh why do we pollute this world?” Three chords, a driving rhythm, a catchy melody and activism. This was my reality.
You see, coincidentally, I had just started taking music lessons. My mother (a musician herself in her youth) enrolled me in not only vocal and guitar lessons, but also in “rock school”. As a result, I was learning about the major scale, fighting pitchiness, struggling to identify intervals, studying the difference between quarter notes and eighth notes and finding strength in my chest voice. I was developing calluses on my fingers, learning my chord shapes, improvising the blues over a I, IV, V, fumbling alternate picking and plucking the melodies of boring classics like “Hot Cross Buns” to the nagging snap of a metronome. I was fronting a couple of bands, learning to sing and play okay at the same time, rehearsing in rooms loud enough to shave a few notches off the stereocilia in my ears, facing stage fright for the first time and cultivating friendships along the way.
I didn’t know it then, but I sure know it now: the moment I knew I wanted to make music was that anxiety stricken night when I chose music. I chose music to release. To express. To cope. To process. I could have chosen any other form of expression via any other art form, but I intuitively chose music. With few exceptions, I have chosen music every day since. Music is my passion, my purpose and my home. It’s not a want and that formative experience in the otherwise quiet and honest tranquility of the darkness is all the evidence I need.