An Important Thing: Moanin'

My blog is super bland looking. I realized my old layout was super mid to late 2000's style one day and I wiped it all. Then I remembered I REALLY hate customizing and all that shit so it's just a blank white thing for now and you can make it look cool if it bothers you.

I like to pretend I'm mysterious and deep when I name my blogs. It's the "artist" in me or whatever. The name of this blog is "The Morning Roars". I named it thus when I began blogging sort of(but not really) regularly at a time in my life where I was dealing with depression head on every day. And mornings were always the worst. Night and sleep meant relief. The morning was a beast roaring me to consciousness, to the endless overwhelming light of day that crushed me. The morning roars. I wrote an album with called that. I don't know if anyone will ever hear it.

I mainly just needed to get that out of my brain. So there.

On to this post. A thing I've often whined about to those around me is the general eventlessness I fell my life has. It never lives up to my expectations and things seem quite boring overall. While I still see it as fairly valid(whether or not it's true), I have noticed that I've neglected some important markers. I think I never saw them as markers cause the effects took so long to kick in. So this is an acknowledgment of one of those events.

In my first winter in Minnesota I got black out depressed. Or rather my depression reached some new depth. Or whatever. It was awful. Everything in that several months is rather hazy in my memory. But there was a breaking point of that terrible time. A sudden crack in the dense darkness that eventually widened to wherever I am today.

In the spring of that year I went to Bethel's jazz band concert as I had a few friends performing. A rare instance of me leaving the house for anything other than work or groceries. The very first song that my friend's jazz band played was a song called "Moanin'". And it woke me up. All dreary heavy thought was blown away by a baritone sax solo that shot into the center of my chest. I laughed for the first time in a long time, I was giggling like a maniac actually. For like 8 minutes. It was pure joy. I felt so absurdly good I just wanted to scream out in the auditorium. I barely refrained. Of course everything wasn't fixed, but for an evening, I felt light. I felt euphoric. I felt like my ribcage was about to explode from some chemical reaction in my chest. I damn near cried.

Music is the best. It can make you feel the worst things and the best things. It's amazing. I don't understand how sound can affect us so much, but I'm glad it does. It's why I make music.

So. Here's the song that woke me up. Fuckin' Moanin'.

Gabriel