Eargasms

I haven´t posted anything here for quite a while but I just wanted to share my guilty pleasure.

Ahhh, those amazing songs, sometimes just a few chords or one sole chord on its own that seems to resonate through every cell in your body. I call them eargasms.

It´s a rare thing to find those songs that do it and each person is different. For example, one song that gets me tingling is Loreena McKennitt´s Mystics Dream I can´t explain what that song does to me, it´s peaks and falls just give me goosebumps and the hair on my head stands up. I love it! David Bowie is another guilty pleasure.

Well, yesterday, I discovered a WHOLE ALBUM that has the same effect. Ceremonials by Florence and the Machine. Goodness gracious, this album has everything!! The tones of the music crawl up my spine. I can´t concentrate on anything except the pleasure its giving me.

You know that feeling when you have a magical kiss, that tingly feeling you get in your mouth around to your ears all down your neck and through your body, well, this album does that to me repeatedly. Multiple eargasms. I´m so happy! If I haven´t convinced you already, go try it now, lock your doors, close the curtains and get comfy.... enjoy!

My history

Ever since I was a child, music has been a part of my life. I´m an over-sensitive typical pisces and I learnt early on that the best way for me to deal with my emotions was to write them down. I don´t remember when exactly it was that those feelings began to turn into lyrics and melodies, but I do know that it stemmed from my mother advising me to keep a diary.

I constantly felt misunderstood and confused as a child. School was full of bullies and cruel children. I had open heart surgery when I was four years old and consequently started my term a little later than the other kids. I remember my first day of school vividly. There was a room full of screaming children who had already formed their first little cliques. Across the room I spotted a blonde girl with big blue eyes. She smiled at me and I decided there and then that she would be my friend. Her name was Marie and we were instantly fast friends.

During those first few years, I formed a close bond with Marie and anther girl, Annie. We were a little eccentric as children and probably alot more immature than the other kids. We liked to make up our own stories and songs. We had mini-adventures each break time and it was with these two girls that my first band was formed. Our imaginations were so big that we would often get into trouble for telling lies or being silly! These days are among some of my fondest memories and one of the saddest days of my life was when Annie decided it was time for us to grow up and stop behaving like children. We were 10 years old.

During that time, we made up our own little songs influenced by Bonjovi and our favourite musicals such as The Sound of Music, Grease, Summer Holiday, etc. The other kids thought we were a bit odd and we often made little mini-presentations for the school or for our favourite teachers. I remember specifically one summer when the school were having a fund raiser to replace the roof that we presented a rap to the school assembly. Most of the kids thought it was hilarious but we had so much fun! I can still remember the lyrics!
"Now we´re the kids from class 5S
and we want you to try your best,
to get the money to raise the roof,
that´s what we want and that´s the truth!

Do what you can do it any way,
Go without crisps for just one day!
Bring those pennies one by one
don´t be shy ask everyone!"

that´s all I can remember! I remember my mum and dad helping me with the rhyming and I think that was the time I began writing my own music. Just after this we made a band called Cool Kids Groove! Again, I can still remember the lyrics to that although it was my friend Annie that wrote them! Very Biker Grove with the aha! at the end of the song!

My first complete song was called Pain. I was about 9 when I wrote it but I didn´t show it to anyone until I was 13. I never really showed my music to anyone until much later when I was studying media at secondary school. I was always too embarrassed and ashamed of the fact that I made up poems and songs.

Pain
Pain. Can´t you feel the pain boy?
Cos´it´s getting stronger the more you stay away.
You broke my heart in two,
Now there´s nothing left for me to do,
But cry, and the tears are rolling from my eyes.

Chorus: Oooh Baby can´t you feel the pain you made?
Oooh babe it wouldn´t be here if you´d stayed.

Pain. can´t you feel the pain boy?
Cos´ I´m getting weaker the more you stay away.
You said we´d be a two,
but now we´re both just sad and blue.
And all I do is cry
and the tears are rolling from my eyes.

As you can see, it was a modest start and God knows who I was writing about. In all honesty, I don´t think I had anyone in mind and was probably just copying some 80s hangover artist that I´d heard on TOTP.

As I previously mentioned, It wasn´t until I started secondary school that I worked up the courage to show any of my writings to someone. I had an english language teacher who had been very encouraging and one of our class projects was to write some poetry. After she gave me some very positive feedback and asked if writing was something I liked to do alot of. I told her that I did and I brought some of my poetry and lyrics to show her. She encouraged me to send it to a publishers, so I did. Nothing was published but I had a lovely letter of encouragement from a publisher telling me to keep on writing and that my poems were beautiful.

At the age of 15, a class project was to invent a band, create the marketing material and promote them. My friend knew that I had some songs written and we decided to use one of these songs to create our "fake band." The songe we used was called Time.

Time
I glance at the clock and it´s telling me it´s time to go.
I can´t stop. You ask me to but I say no.
I´ve gotta leave you soon, but you keep me hanging on.
You just don´t understand, that something´s going wrong.

Chorus:
Oh now it´s time, but you just bring me down.
Boy take the hint and understand our love has drowned.
I can´t stop. I´ve left this romance far too long.
I´ve gotta go. My heart´s been done too much wrong.

My head says stay. But my heart tells me leave.
I can´t stop. I find it hard to breathe.
I´ve gotta leave you soon but you keep me hanging on.
Boy don´t you understand, I´ve waited much too long.

Now that it´s time for us to part
It´s too late to say sorry cos´you broke my heart.
I didn´t want to be cruel, I didn´t want you to cry.
How was I to know that you wouldn´t say bye?
I gave you all the signs that I didn´t want to be together
and you should know that love don´t always last forever.

This song makes me cringe sooo much and I´m sure that anyone who was part of this project feels the same way!

Over the years I´ve continued writing and my friend Emma was the one person who always encouraged me to persue my dream. At 18, whilst she was starting her own dream of persuing fashion, I began looking for other musicians to work with. I concentrated on developing lyrics and structures that other people would want to listen to and she was my test subject. If Emma liked it, it must be ok was my philosophy.

At 19, I presented my first song Mundane Reality at an open mic night in Birmingham. My friend Chris played 12 string guitar and the response was amazing! It was a very small bar and only a handful of people but my brother recorded it on his phone and everyone was cheering and applauding and it was the best feeling in the world! You could even hear one woman singing along to the chorus at the end and saying "I really like this song! Did she write it?"

After that night, I played a few more acoustic sets around local open mic nights in Birmingham. I recorded my first demo cd in 2006 with a guitarist called Chris Brain. i did this at Fatback Studios in Birmingham. I had a band called Lions Child for a short few months in 2006/2007 but we failed to produce anything or even play a show. It was fun at the time just practicing and jamming together.

In early 2007, A friend of my family gave my demo to a friend of his that worked in television. He asked me to write a biography about myself and prepare for an interview with Parlophone Records but I bottled it. I knew I was moving to Brazil in that coming December and decided that I didn´t want to persue anything serious at the time. I was heavily overweight and my confidence and self esteem was at an all time low.

In December 2007, I moved to Brazil. I recorded Bigger than This as an online collaberation project with Noel Warn who is based in London. We never met in person but the finished product was something I was particularly proud of. I started looking for a band again in October 2008 and that´s when I met my current guitarist (and now boyfriend!) and since then we have been playing together in a band called Playdoll. We have played a few gigs locally in Londrina and we are hoping to have many more moving forward. We play covers mostly but we are always working on new and original material.

Since being with the guys, my writing has progressed to a new level and I am inspired and more focused than ever. It´s been a long, slow journey but I´m finally feeling like there is something happening. I don´t know what but for me this has been the most rewarding experience and it´s lead me to a place and to people that can never be forgotten or replaced.

Who would have thought that the shy little girl with a hole in her heart that wrote songs to make herself feel better would find herself on the other side of the globe persuing her musical dream with someone she loves?!!!

Introduction

Since an early age, music has fascinated me. Admittedly, my contact with ´real´ music came quite late in life. To give you an idea, my mother used to try to style her perm and do her make-up in the kitchen whilst listening to Heart FM. Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan and Bananarama were probably among the first artists I heard regularly. Bear in mind this was the 80s and after recently staying at my mothers house for a few weeks, I can safely say that the playlist hasn´t changed that much in twenty years.
My mother was a huge Elvis fan and by the time I was 6, I probably knew the words to nearly all the songs he ever made. She also loved listening to Mariah Carey, Celine Dion, Whitney Houston and Meatloaf. My father, on the other hand, was a little more conservative. Sunday afternoons where spent listening to Vivaldi, Pink Flloyd and The Moody Blues whilst my mother peeled potatoes. Between the two of them, they managed to provide me with a fairly diverse base on which to develop my own musical tastes.


As a child, I went through the normal school girl crushes on boy bands like Take That, Backstreet Boys, East17 and Boyzone. (Yes, I had the posters on my walls from Smash Hits Magazine!) I remember my first concert. I was 10 and my friend and I were taken by our mothers to see Boyzone at the NEC in Birmingham. Obviously, we knew the music was awful at the time because we both sat there with our fingers in our ears throughout the entire show! Thank God cassette tapes were a brief phase in music history.

Ah yes, taping the top 40 on a Sunday night. My teenage years were spent trying to define my musical and social identity. I secretly loved No Doubt, Greenday, Prodigy and Guns n Roses, but I could never admit this to my friends! The popular culture at my school was the early r&b and garage scene. So my cd collection boasted 2pac, sosolidcrew, bob marley and various garage compilations. Another music scene I crossed over into during my late teenage years was the dance/trance culture. The raves and Ibiza style clubs were among my first regular haunts. Not surprisingly as these places were much easier to get in to as an underage drinker.

Throughout my life, there has always been contact with Rock and Metal. Many of the underground bars I went to regularly were "dodgy" and smelly affairs. I remember puking blue vomit at a place called Eddies no.8 and trying to mosh in my platform boots. I dated a drummer briefly. He was very much in the gothic scene and I remember it was a very short affair. After he took me to a fetish club, I realised it wasn´t going to work out! I was about 15 and I don´t think I´ve ever been so scared in all my life!
After leaving school, I finally started to develop my own musical tastes, away from the pressures of being in the "in" crowd. With the help of the internet and my little brother, I started to discover all the music I´d missed out on the first time around.

Nowadays, I love all types of music. I appreciate the work that goes into creating something as heavy as Stillborn but I can still be listen to something as melodically vocal as Dog Days.