Falcon Ridge Folk Festival is coming up and my guitar is once again getting a work out. I’ve been going to this festival out in Hillsdale, NY for as long as I can remember. Apart from Christmas, going to Falcon Ridge is the steadiest family tradition I have with my father’s side of the family. Every year on the weekend before my birthday we gather our camping supplies and trek out to the festival. Recently, now that neither my older sister or I live at my father’s house any more, getting to the festival has become more complicated and yet we still figure it out.
In the past few years I’ve made the transition from listening to music to actually playing music at the festival. I wrote my first folk song at Falcon Ridge in a small notepad that had blue paw prints all over it when I was about twelve. Since then, I’ve been slowly developing my confidence as a musician. Although I’ve played classical piano since I was five, playing songs that I wrote is always a much more intimate experience, one that I didn’t feel comfortable sharing for quite a while.
At first the only people who heard my songs were my older sister and mother, often over the phone. When I got to college I started pushing myself and played songs for a few close friends, trembling the whole time. Around this time I started bringing my guitar to Falcon Ridge but it took a year or two for me to do more than fiddle around with chords and mumble words under my breath.
The more I played the more I felt comfortable. I branched out even more, practicing in the music rooms where people could overhear me. I even started recording videos of my songs on Photobooth and posting them to Youtube, although I had to close my eyes while I pressed the submit button and run from the room as the video uploaded. Some of my videos I can still stand to watch while others have been hidden from the rather uninterested public eye.
In the last two years I’ve started playing at the jam sessions at Falcon Ridge with my lovely friend Rachel. Each time I go I feel a little better, a little more confident. The people there are so open and supportive. I will never forget once of the first times Rachel convinced me to come to play music in one of the many tents on the hill. At first I wouldn’t do anything, but soon I started to play songs and even sing them. After one song a rather drunk man told me I had the voice of an angel and his remark was greeted by cheers from around the circle.
Since I’ve moved to Boston I’ve written a couple of songs that I’m actually fairly proud of (for now at least) and participated in a jam night with some friends who I met at the MFA. Ever so slowly, I’m continuing to creep out of my musical shell and singing out in the open instead of under my breath in dark dorm rooms in the middle of the night. I bought my boyfriend a nice audio recorder for his birthday and stole it back to record some of my new songs.
The song in this post is actually about him, I had to write one didn’t I? The recording is still rough, I didn’t do anything to it mostly because I don’t know how and I’ll definitely be doing it again but for now I’m pushing myself again. One of the most important ways I need to push myself is by playing the same game that my best friend invented when she moved to Boston and had to start driving around these crazy streets. “Just go!”
