The Beginning

When I was very little, I loved music. I would pick up my mom's guitar and strum it without making any sort of chord and pretend I was one of The Beach Boys. However the music I listened to was pretty much limited to what I got from my family. I owned a Monkees greatest hits album that I used to love, and "The Sign" by Ace of Base. My mom was into Stevie Wonder and The Beatles, and my older sister listened to more popular music. She introduced me to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but it would be some time before I really got into them.
When I was 11 or so, I realized that I didn't know a lot of music and I wanted to change that. The first thing I did was go to the library and looked through the CD's. I didn't know what I was looking for, so I thumbed through them until I found one that sounded familiar; Aerosmith.

I can't imagine any other reasons that an
11 year old me might have picked this one out

I had heard the name before but I didn't know anything about them. I immediately checked out the CD and brought it home to put on my Ipod. The album was Just Push Play, one of the more recent Aerosmith albums, and as soon as I started listening to it, I couldn't stop. I would go to the library and get more CD's, mostly Aerosmith, but also bands my sister would tell me about like My Chemical Romance. This new interest led me to my dad's collection, which would become my new primary source of music. When I first borrowed from his CD collection, I recognized many of the songs from hearing them on car rides. A lot of U2 and Rolling Stones songs were familiar to me. Some of the first albums he lent me to put on my Ipod were: Smash Hits - Jimi Hendrix, Hot Rocks - Rolling Stones, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb - U2, the first four Led Zeppelin albums, Stevie Ray Vaughan, the list goes on. One moment that made an impression on me was when my dad showed me the music video for "Bust a Move" by Young MC. He told me to pay attention to the bass player, because that's how it's supposed to be done. This bass player was Flea. (He comes in right around the 2 minute mark)

A lot of things about this were new to me, but most importantly, it was the beginning of me discovering music through playing the bass.