Discovery, Journey, Destination, Music

Posted for Shawn Illenberg

"Post one: Discovery

All my life I have strived to find the one thing in life that makes me actually happy; I found that thing when I was 15 years old in my friends garage. We had been friends for years before I had always been envious of his musical talent, but that cold, rainy October afternoon I decided I would try my hand in it. I picked up his bass guitar that he had laying around and he hopped on the drum set and told me what to play. I fiddled with the strings for a minute or two and told him to come in, and as soon as he hit that hi hat, I knew this was happiness. The notes played off of each other and the music we created washed over me blissfully, creating a sense of peace and warmth I had never felt before. 

         Day after day we would walk to his house and play music, working on my technique, style and musicianship. He taught me things I could've never learned online: how to feel the music, how to listen to changes and how to develop my own style and passion for playing. This was the start of something for me, the start of something I could see myself doing my whole life that could bring me inner happiness, the start of an inner movement, the shifting of my body and mind to something greater than myself. My friend single handedly introduced me to myself, and I cherished him and everything he was. I learned about myself from the music, from the rhythm, from the time. I learned more about life through the music than I ever did in my regular schooling. 

        As I learned to be a musician, and I learned how to play this incredible instrument nothing else mattered to me. All the stress and anger from my life went away and I become free, I become happy. I had achieved something that I had pretty much given up on in life. And it was weird, my happiness was no longer measured in how much money I had, how many friends I had. In that moment, on a cold, rainy October afternoon, my happiness was measured in the abstractness of music and the emotion I could put into the ears of the people who listened to me. I had achieved happiness. 

Post Two: The Journey

Through my high school career I used the happiness I gained through music to build me up and take me away. Honestly it was scary, not knowing what will come next, not knowing where to go in the city. But, in the end I found myself in each place I played that guitar. About two years later my friend and I had grown closer than any two individuals I had known. We knew each other's thoughts and movements before the other one did, and that translated to the music we made together. We started to branch out and play venues, we did what any friends in high school who wanted to start a band do: come up with a dumb name, a motive, and the songs. But after playing our first show as "The Rhythm Section" we both knew that those norms were not right for us. We ditched the name on everything but social media, we got rid of the fake motive and scrapped the pre-written music we had. Instead of playing into the societal stereotype everyone wanted us to follow, we did our own thing. "Landon and Shawn" was our new name, or motive was our love for each other and music, and our songs came from the heart, improvised at every show. We did not want to hold the music down and force it to play by our rules, instead we followed it and listened to what it wanted us to play next. Nothing compares to the emotions that come out when I am on stage playing music that comes straight from my soul. The happiest moments in my life came from those moments. And because of this shift from the norms to our own thing we realized our own journey and our own way of making ourselves happy. 

Part Three: The Destination

As I end my high school career my friend and I split up and go to different universities. At this point I'm heartbroken, and the questions started to come. What am I going to do? Who am I going to play music with? That summer we played music every single day in anticipation of us parting ways, we played as many shows as we can and we finally recorded a EP. It was the best summer of my life. But as the summer drew to a close I realized that I could still find happiness in music, even if the music did not take me out in the world, and I would not meet any new people from it. For the next couple of weeks my happiness was gone. I stopped playing music because my schooling become exponentially harder and my life was changing so much. I did not know what to do to find that joy again. 

        But that all changed when I met my friend Evan Dunne. He introduced me to a different way of playing music one that I never knew before and it expanded my mind. We did not have to go play shows and write songs to enjoy the music, we would just play and play as much as we could in our free time. And I learned to accept the fact that the one thing that would make me happy I could only get every so often. And that actually made it incredibly special to me, it was not a constant stream of joy and wonderful events. It was small moments, that gave me something to look forward to, it gave me a reason to finish out the week strong so I could enjoy my weekends of playing with friends and just enjoy life. And that I did. I enjoyed life so much that it spilled into my everyday, music become who I am. Music became my life, and I finally became happy."  

Posted for Shawn Illenberg