the projection room above the auditorium

I wanted to reintroduce myself to FatEmery.com by writing about something I want to write about. It seems that every time I try to write a meaningful piece about my life, or some thought I’ve been kicking around my head for some time, it starts alright, and then promptly dies in my drafts…which is why there are 3 times as many half-written drafts than there are posts on this here website (also, in part, why there hasn’t been a new one in over a year lol).

With that said, I want to chat about music. I love music, but my engagement with it comes and goes, often contingent on the state of my employment and/or mental health and/or depressive episodes, which shockingly all seem to be interconnected. Unlike music, I hate working. But, I’m not doing that currently, and I’ve been taking my Zoloft, so my music intake has skyrocketed (I just can’t cum — yeehaw!)

But what do I want to say about music – that’s such a broad topic to approach. Well, because this is my little project and I’m writing it, I want to reflect a bit on my relationship to it over the years, and where it is now. From my time in church choir, to its position as a catalyst for self-destruction, to learning how to enjoy things more casually – music has been a constant in my 30 years here on Earth.

Part I: Musical Beginnings —

As a youngin’, music was ingrained into my everyday. The youngest of 6 kids, each of my older siblings learned to play piano on the ancient upright we had in our living room before me. Yes, I was subjected, daily, to the onslaught of “Chopsticks” (haven’t considered the name of that tune in years… is it racist?), half attempts at Für Elise, and whatever archaic daily exercises my prodigy of an older brother was tackling at that time. We have a family home video where I am an infant, in the background you can hear one of the other kids insistently trying to play something on the piano for the duration – that was just life at our house.

As kind of a side note, I love that upright piano. It’s my mother’s mother’s piano, built in the late 1800s, and has become something of a contentious family heirloom. Maybe there’s a post for another day there.

I dabbled in sitting at the piano before I was the right age to start lessons (my parents had a rule that you had to be 10 before you could start lessons – they were expensive, we were poor, etc…). I remember plucking through Mary Had a Little Lamb and Jingle Bells, but I don’t really remember learning to read music. In hindsight, I have a feeling it was the aptly named Music Time at church every week – all the Mormon kids knew music to some degree. Irregardless, irrelevant – I remember feeling so cool when I went to my first piano lesson and the teacher had me skip the introduction book because I already knew sooooo much (that’s how it felt when I was 10, at least; I’d probably be the same now). And that started my own education of music, classically.

Simultaneously, I was receiving a musical education from my very cool and very discerning parents and older siblings. What was in: Eric Clapton, Ben Folds, Dave Matthews Band, Dashboard Confessional, Michael Bublé (oh my!!!). What was out: music by anyone non-white; anything with a beat. Reflecting on my childhood exposure to music as a 30-year-old has been absolutely stunning – my dear partner will mention a hit R&B tune from the early 2000s and I will have no recollection or exposure; I didn’t know a Mariah Carey tune outside of All I Want For Christmas Is You until like 2017; until I met my partner, when someone mentioned Selena, I thought they were talking about SELENA GOMEZ. CAN YOU IMAGINE, the absolute audacity.

In my teens, I remember my father saying something along the lines of “music died with disco.” I get, now, that this was a blanket racist catchall. I can’t say for certain, but I do think my quality of life would have been 100 times better with a little Donna Summer in my youth. I probably would have been a lot gayer, though, which presented its own problems at that time, anyway, so who knows!!!

Here’s the thing, though – I thought the education I was receiving from my family members was good. It influenced my general superiority complex and my entire musical landscape for years. I can and will gripe about the influences and dangers of streaming and its effects on music and its quality over the last however many years, but I will also say – I now have artists I missed out on accessible and on repeat in a way that I couldn’t have before.

Ok, quick summary – on one hand, young me is taking weekly piano lessons and singing in church, and on the other, young me is getting the worst exposure to popular music you can imagine. So let’s move to intersection of these things + trying to adopt my own musical identity.

Part II: Musical Identity Development —

I approached a convergence of my musical identities as I entered my pre-teens and teens; it makes sense, that’s like the time for change. Britney Spears, Hellogoodbye, Owl City – my first torrented tracks, my first purchased CD, and my first concert, all between the ages of 10-13. I purchased my first iPod in 2005 with money I had saved up from a very problematic weight loss contract with my father. It was a white first generation iPod Nano, by the way – I think it had 2 gb of storage. This is also when I picked up choir and band (saxophone) at school, continuing the piano lessons I had as before. I wasn’t great at any of the things I had dabbled in (yet), but each of my siblings had done some combination of music throughout elementary/middle school – it was just what we did. So I carried on, and I did get better. It’s like that quote from Adventure Time that I vaguely remember – “sucking at something is the first step to being kind of good at something,” or something like that.

Middle school was unkind in so many ways, and in others, it was even worse. Much of the aforementioned “even worse” can be reflected on some other day. For now, we’ll look at what I guess I’ll call a “musical experimental phase.”

My second iPod was the square iPod nano and it had, like, exponentially larger storage (it really did, it was 8 gb – that was a game changer). I want to say I got it for Christmas in 8th grade. Conveniently, around this very same time, my best friend had begun dabbling in music sharing of dubious nature, so my iPod was constantly filled with new tunes. Emo was trending, and that’s what my friend group shifted toward, and it’s who I wanted to be. I shoved my love of Britney down and away, bought darker clothes and converse shoes, and tried my best not to be the overweight faggy little Mormon I was.

As a result of this makeunder, there was music from groups with names like “Suicide Silence” featuring obscene cover art with pretty girls holding bloody innards throughout my playlists. I tried desperately to like them; I think they mostly scared me. I did hit the “indie pop-punk” scene pretty hard in its stead – trying desperately to outcool my peers. “Oh, you haven’t heard of Jimmy Eat World? You would love them.” I told you, the superiority complex was wild, especially for someone jamming to Owl City and 3OH!3 on the regular. The unironic highlight of my music taste at this time — Chutes Too Narrow by The Shins. Still excellent.

In 2008, the sister 10 years my elder had an mp3 phone that she would connect to her Toyota Corolla by cassette-tape converter. One of the only albums she kept on its minimal storage was The Fame by one Lady Gaga. I remember windows down, unabashedly jamming with her to Eh, Eh (Nothing Else I Can Say), and it struck me that music could be fun. Gaga wasn’t the only moment happening, but she is someone I can identify as a catalyst for what happened to me next — I realized that I loved pop music.

It sounds kind of stupid in hindsight, but that was a mindblowing and also deeply complicated thing right then. Not only was it not cool with my friends (that’s the music we made fun of at the middle school dances!!), but everyone knew that only the gay boys listened to girlie-pop, and the rumors (albeit true), were already rampant. Not to mention, my own dad was breathing down my neck about masculine expectations – god, what would he think!? (Again, there’s context here that we will not be exploring at this time lol.)

So, as I entered high school, I pivoted. I could like pop music if it was good pop music. Lady Gaga is classically trained; Feist used to front a heavy metal band – these were excuses I would throw at people even though no one was asking. Let’s be honest, I wanted to feel superior. And that hasn’t even touched the Tumblr of it all – talk about irreparable damage.

Concurrently, I was steeped in musical education at school and independently. When my musically gifted and immediately older brother and sister both left the house, I dove into work at the piano. 10th grade was when I began taking piano lessons with a teacher at the local university. He was kind, he had high expectations, and, at times, I excelled at this new challenge. Me of present mind will look at the pieces I once obsessively practiced to perfection and hardly comprehend the sheer onslaught of notes on a page. I was in the marching band, the jazz band, the jazz choir, and took music theory throughout my time in high school.

During those years, I had imagined music as my future. I knew I was the best dude in our high school vocal ensemble, and I would get goosebumps at the idea of performing for crowds and sharing my amazing talent for the rest of my life. It was delusional, but it was fun to believe that’s where I was headed. I spent the summer before college hammering out audition pieces on the piano, and learning showtunes and classics in Latin to sing for auditions to the music program.

My collegiate level music experience started and ended in that audition room. I don’t fully remember the events that occurred, but I do remember completely forgetting my words, being allowed to use the music to help, and still ending in utter tears – some poor woman in the department consoling me and offering the advice to try again in the spring. I did not do that. I was disastrously embarrassed and absolutely horrified; I never went back to that department!

Sorry, not everything in that last paragraph is true. I did attend concerts and TedTalks and shit at the auditoriums in the arts building. Further, my college music experience simply graduated from actual accredited programs and teachers to the Mormon Institute of Religion, where I was welcomed with open arms into the highly sought after, audition-only, group – Latter Day Voices.

Latter Day Voices was truly a life-changing experience. This is where I learned I could loathe music, this is where I learned that it could be used as a tool for punishment and manipulation – thanks Brother Salmond! Eat shit! Truly, though, the combination of fumbling what I thought was my future, compounded with the consolation prize of additional religious trauma, led me to the conclusion that that was simply enough. My classical and educational love of music was pretty much put to rest. Here lie FatEmery’s music dreams, 2005-2014.

Part III: A New Appreciation —

It was appropriate that as I abandoned one dream, I accepted the reality of a different one – one where I got to be queer. Following failed attempts at conversion therapy in high school, I’d accepted internally, and shared with select few, that I had intentions to “be gay” but “not act on it.” That’s how you balance queerness with Mormonism, I guess. Luckily, in my chaotic departure from my Plan, I also chaotically departed my 19-year love affair with the Mormon church. Phew.

Already the intersection of a few major events, 2015 also brought my real buy-in to the streaming craze. I purchased a Spotify premium membership with the money from my first real jobs (movie theater usher & sandwichmaker), and took up the mantel as resident pop music faggot. It wasn’t hard – there were like 20 gay people at my college and they were all from rural Utah, no one cared. I had encyclopedic knowledge of the current (at that time) top 40 players, chart standings, producer credits, etc… Essential listening being Taylor Swift’s inescapable pop project, 1989, on repeat that entire semester. Oh baby, if you only knew – music is so much more than that.

It was around this time that a friend also introduced me to something called “rap.” I didn’t know it then, well I probably kind of did, but I was insufferable about my intake of rap. Similar to my unbearable superiority complex in pop music, I felt compelled to argue for the rap music I enjoyed. I was arguing for nothing because I was defending rappers that made music for white audiences – J. Cole, Childish Gambino, Drake. Sure, at least one of those folks has grown and shown their chops (and I still bump Because the Internet regularly!!), but my inherent bias was loud and clear.

There’s certainly a more intensive and nuanced discussion to be had here, but to paint a good picture of who I was, and my understanding of music and the world around me at this time, picture a 20 year old gay boy carrying around a 750 mL bottle of white wine with a crazy straw in it, drunkenly asking every partygoer if they had ever heard Trap Queen by Fetty Wap. Spoiler alert, everyone had – it was 2015, that song was everywhere.

This all sounds very shallow, and a lot of it was; a lot of my early 20s was. I spent the bulk of my budget on a newly growing vinyl record collection and tickets to every live show I could get my hands on. (Perhaps someday I’ll document the shows I’ve been to – I continue to love live music).

But there were powerful moments in music, then, too. I’m struck by how moved I was hearing Never is a Promise by Fiona Apple for the first time; the unexpected comfort Carrie & Lowell brought me after the violence at the Pulse nightclub; tracks of magnitude that remind me of clinging to my humanity as I fought the urge to self-harm, or ultimately succumbed – shout out to Backseat by Charli Adams, a track that I will never be able to listen to, again. These moments in music that were regular, but felt extraordinary. I am surprised, even now, that I ever thought the reach of music affected only those who really got it. How lucky I was to find that my musical education was not limited to the staves and the piano keys I had felt bound to; how wonderful it has been to expand my understanding of music and the joy that it offers, un-technically. I am so grateful to have found that understanding, because my early 20s were littered with resentment at the hours I felt I had wasted preparing for a future that I had fucked up. Compounded with the inextricable connection classical music has with religion, and how deeply spiteful and wronged I’d felt by Mormonism, I remember thinking that my connection had been severed. What I know now is what I’ve written about so far – my connection to music wasn’t severed, it just changed, as I continue to do.

I am happy to report that my relationship to classical music has mostly mended (though the relationship with Mormonism has not).

Part IV: Post-College to Present —

In speaking of my changing relationship with music, after exhaling the remnants of my music education and religious upbringing, my relationship to music became very casual. We would see each other every now and again, but I was busy! From ages 23-26, I attended grad school, worked part-time, interned, and helped raise our very new, very needy puppy. Concurrently, we experienced a global pandemic – things were a bit chaotic. To be honest, I don’t remember actively searching for new music at all, then. Things I do remember listening to – Folklore, Future Nostalgia, Punisher; Caroline Polachek, Charli XCX, Doja Cat. Mostly pop girls I had already known, and maybe a few new tracks that Spotify had sprinkled into my new mix daily, or whatever it’s called.

After the world “opened,” again, we attended the 2023 Treefort Music Festival in Downtown Boise. I was vaguely familiar with an electropop duo called Magdalena Bay, so I dragged some friends across town to the Egyptian Theatre to see their set. I’ll be honest – the live show was not life-changing, per se. The sound was a bit wack, and the crowd was a little lacking. What did translate was the intention and the story behind their performance. They played their most recent album, Mercurial World, start to finish, and I don’t think I had ever been to a show where an artist had committed to their current work that way. I made my partner buy me a hat after the show – singer Mica was selling their own merch outside the theater; it is insane to see how much they’ve grown.

But that’s not the point. I returned home and listened to Mercurial World (and more Mag in general) with a studious intensity. I learned that these nerdy kids had backgrounds in music and were making smart, storytelling based pop music. I thought it was fascinating and I would likely identify this work as my introduction to the current era of my relationship to music.

The phrase that comes to mind for this era is “casual obsession.” That is very, very oxymoronic in nature, but since I can’t seem to have a healthy relationship to anything, it’s what I’m going with. I listen to music constantly, I document my listens and create shitpost playlists, and I still sound so unbelievably pretentious when I talk about it, but I also know that I love music. I can say that confidently, without the heaviness that thought once carried. Where obligation once rested, there is now space for excitement, interest, and curiosity to reside.

As for the casual in “casual obsession” – there are weeks, even months, where I don’t listen to new projects. Depressive episodes keep me bound to comfort classics, or life changes upset my mental equilibrium and I can’t accommodate anything more. The sheer magnitude of music out there can be overwhelming, in itself, but I’m learning to allow these musical lulls to happen without guilt or concern. I don’t always do great – that’s why I’m learning.

When I set out to do something with FatEmery.com, I shared bits of my listening habits and histories in my monthly recaps – I think this is something I’d like to try to do again. But rather than make this post even longer than it already is, and in an effort to hit publish on something for this site, I’ll get started on a separate entry when I’m done here.

If you decided to read this, thank you for joining me. It was certainly a journey to write.

xo,

FatEmery