It was the first time you heard a particular note, drum beat or electronically created sound that made your ears tingle, your heart skip a beat and resonated with your soul. This is “My Song” – a series where the music that makes the person is spotlighted. James Bullock looks at a time when his budding musical interests reflected the opposite feeling he had with a high school relationship and the world they’d created.
2000-2001 wasn’t the best time for me. In a lot of ways, the sophomore years of high school were the toughest. I went from being the new kid to really coming to grips with the knowledge that the days of my childhood youth were over. But thanks to high school and myriad of friends both new and old, the tenth grade allowed me to delve deeper into music. Before the days of Youtube videos being available at the push of a computer button, or MP3 players being affordable to the point two to three hours of work could get you enough gigabytes to upload your entire CD collection, finding music pretty much hinged on physical interaction (unless you were into file sharing and liked your computer getting viruses).
By the tail end of 2000, I was coming to the realization that my high school sweetheart was not going to be around anymore. She was moving away for at least the rest of tenth grade (more like for the rest of her life up to this point). We, through our mutual “teenage angst” struggles, had created a little world for ourselves where nothing else mattered when we were around each other. In truth, we weren’t good for each other from a scholastic perspective at that time as we’d skip classes and generally goof off.
By my sixteenth birthday, I didn’t want a car or something expensive; but my first Jimi Hendrix CD. It was listening to the “Experience Hendrix” best-of album that perfectly reflected my feelings in regards to the world my now-ex girlfriend crafted with me during our “running” days – “Little Wing”. The surreal, gossamer sound that comes from the song describing all of these wonderful, mostly imaginary beings representing the love of someone made me feel like, somehow, Hendrix had read my mind and heart years before I was even born. Though the relationship didn’t end as the fifteen-year-old version of myself would’ve wanted, the joyous feelings that came from those days still blossom anytime I hear Little Wing.
