Jaimee Eat World

I had a moment of mild panic when I realized so many of my own songs actively reference or are spun off ideas from some of my favourite songs – and then I remembered that one of my favourite songs is A Praise Chorus.

Are You Gonna Live Your Life Wondering, Standing In The Back Looking Around?

Choosing to become a musician has been a funny journey and the word “choosing” feels inherently wrong in some ways, but it really has been a series of unique choices that has led to where I am today.

Although I’ve always listened and been drawn to music, it wasn’t until I was around 11 that I really felt the push to learn. Music class in school was boring as sin, but being in a proper rock band seemed the right path. I’ve always been enamoured by great musicians, whether they were vocalists, guitarists, bassists, drummers or keys/organists or whatever else, but above everything else I wanted to play guitar.

My folks had started their own businesses sometime in the mid-90’s, so I would make some extra money doing odd jobs for them. Real boring shit – like packing little plastic bags with a couple screws and washers as part of the installation kits for bathroom shelves dad would sell, or stuffing letters into envelopes for mom. That kind of thing coupled with meticulously saving birthday money for years led to my first guitar purchase.

I was really determined to get good at it, too. I started biking home from school at lunch time, abandoning my friends for the hour just to get another 20 minutes in practising. But I really felt like I had no idea what I was doing and the learning curve was really tough. When I didn’t find myself learning at a pace I hoped, after a few months I started avoiding the instrument – too embarrassed to play and practice because of how bad I was, I never wanted to be heard.

Looking back now, that’s insane of course because you can’t get good at anything if you’re too afraid to work on it, but I didn’t really have a support system on this journey back then which I suppose is why I’m sort of used to that same feeling now.

The feelings of doubt would never stay very long. I was always called right back to it and I’d just find other ways to work through my fears, slowly over time. I almost never practiced with my amplifier – too loud, too obvious when the mistakes were made. And I told you last week how I’d sing and record myself in the shed.

It was going to be a long road, but part of me really didn’t want to spend my life standing in the crowd.

Eventually I started a band and we played some shows. And I was somehow leading the band (that was not necessarily part of the initial plan, but I couldn’t avoid that either).

But then the band broke up and I didn’t know how to proceed from there.

Are You Gonna Waste Your Time Thinking How You’ve Grown Up Or How You Missed Out?

Part of me already thought maybe I was too old to be in a band when I was just 20. And that’s also insane obviously, but it’s amazing how much media I consumed back then that highlighted how young my favourite musicians were when they got started or signed or booked their first tour. It wrecks absolute havoc on your brain especially when you’re still sitting in that phase of things where you think you’re not very good or experienced enough to be deserving of those same opportunities.

Besides, I’d pushed myself into the studio brat path by then and can you even be both a studio audio engineer and a musician at the same time? Who has the time?!

They felt like impossible things to commit to simultaneously, especially because in order to pursue the audio engineer dream you also had to pick up yet another job to allow yourself the ability to continue that career path, because you were working for free and gas isn’t cheap. I felt like I had no time to play music and that’s kind of ironic.

When I’d try to put together a new band in my early 20’s, it was a lot tougher than when I was in high school because people had like, real bills and real life problems. People were getting married, having kids and needed to prioritize work over bands for what I assume are very obvious reasons as this is only even more challenging now, some 15 years later.

But yet again, I couldn’t stop that tiny little voice in the back of my head that would find ways to remind me that, no, you’re not too old (seriously, so funny, I was so young when I thought that. I’ve basically always felt this way) or too grown or whatever, but the longer you wait the more time you waste not doing this thing you really, really seem to want to do.

Things Are Never Gonna Be Quite What You Want

This blog is already a little longer than I normally like to make these because as it happens, today is the 3^rd anniversary of the release of one of my own albums. It wasn’t the first one I released, but the first one for my Neither Could Dylan project which really encapsulates everything I’m sort of talking about and why I’m here now.

In my early 20’s, to step back for another brief moment, there was a period of time where I decided to try and make my own record. An acoustic folk thing, just me and an acoustic guitar, because it was the avenue that made sense to me as a songwriter without a backing band and without the ability to play other instruments. It wasn’t what I ever envisioned for myself (I can’t do this on my own), and things still weren’t gelling properly when I went to record a song. I was still too new at it all and thought it was too bad to continue, so I abandoned the project. And subsequently, abandoned all my projects for years and years following.

I resigned myself to supporting roles. Bass for other bands, producing and engineering for other bands, never my own.

I could never find myself in the ideal circumstance to pursue what I wanted and often didn’t know how to tackle those obstacles myself. This persisted a remarkably long time until one day something just sort of changed.

The difference, I think, came down to suddenly really having something to say that could only be expressed the way I’d come to appreciate other people expressing their own stories and experiences – through songs.

Now, despite all the time I’d spent working with other people on their projects, starting my own was still a weirdly foreign concept. I still wasn’t sure how I was going to do things, but I had a better sense of it than I did before. I could sort of play guitar and now I could sort of play bass, and I could sort of program drums and sometimes I didn’t completely hate myself when I sung.

I never really wanted to start a project where I was doing everything myself, but at this point I felt like I had no choice.

I couldn’t meet up with anyone in person anymore (thanks catastrophic pandemic) and sending tracks back and fourth to musicians online that I didn’t know while I was still trying to figure out the sound I wanted to create didn’t even cross my mind and if it did, I surely would have deemed it a nightmare scenario.

And I still felt old, but now 30, I knew how dumb it was to feel old at 20. And I imagine I’ll feel the same at 40 about being 30 and so on and so fourth. I can’t change my age and I have to really just accept that.

Even at 30, I suppose, you have to start sometime.

Again, I didn’t really feel like I had a choice here. This has always been sort of a compulsion that I can’t shake. It wasn’t really a “you really want to do this thing, you should really give yourself the opportunity to try,” so much as it was a, “I keep pulling you back here and I’m not letting you go until you do the damn thing,” and now that I really felt like I had things to say and lyrics pouring out of every orifice, I had to just figure out how to do all the things that had confounded me for so many years of my life.

So for 3 years I did that, just randomly, without really understanding what I was doing or if it made sense or sounded sonically okay and if that even mattered because I was doing the damn thing.

And a lot of it was really bad for a while, but then I wrote the Acceptance album and, even with its quirks and mistakes and weird keys parts or bad drum programming, I felt like I turned some kind of corner.

The circumstances were never going to be ideal for me for this, in fact at this point I think we can all agree it is highly unlikely that they ever will be, but I’m no longer standing around waiting for something else to happen or someone else to arrive to give myself permission to try.

I Wanna Always Feel Like Part Of This Was Mine

I never really realized how often a lot of my favourite songs reference other songs or artists, so much so that when I found myself subconsciously doing it I thought I should avoid doing it, but it turns out it’s a pretty common thing, so I’ve embraced it.

When I started writing songs again I knew a lot of it was coming from places of hurt and grief and I suspected I would never really write a love song because it wasn’t something I knew or really felt. I’ve written quite a few in the last few years now, but the secret for me is that they’re not really about people I know – they’re all about bands I listen to. Bands I’ve found myself returning to through every experience I’ve had, good, bad, weird and otherwise. Bands that have unknowingly always offered support when there was none.

Those songs are always my favourite.