Return to Richmond

So the other day I finally went to Kew near Richmond to have my guitar fixed. I was once at college in Acton and spent time in in Turnham Green, Chiswick, Ealing and occasionally Richmond.
I took a walk up to Richmond hill and had a pint. Very pretty indeed.
Thankfully at the top of Richmond Hill there is a nice pub (Where Townshend and Jagger can sometimes be seen apparently) So I had a pint and some brandy. It was the 15th of May, or 15/05, or as Americans date stuff, 5/15. So it had been dubbed Quadrophenia Day. I didn't drink enough to be "Out of my brain on the train" back home, but I was wearing a Parka...

Rehearsal mishaps and live performance scew-ups...

Last month whilst rehearsing with the band and missing our bassist I decided that what was needed was some energy. So I started jumping around and then took the stupid decision to perform a few windmills. This is stupid because I know on my Les Paul guitar I have a good chance of hitting the pickup switch (I've done it before and made it quite wobbly)
Anyway I did some windmill, hit the switch, and suddenly my guitar was screetching feedback. My Les Paul has always been prone to microphonic feedback, but this was something else.
With a mere 4 days til our next gig, I was to put it frankly, fucked.

I quickly thought about my backup guitars, - A cheap Squire Stratocaster with a broken machinehead, a cheap Les Paul copy with a broken machine head and a Epiphone Sheraton with a bad 17th fret. Lovely.
The cheap Les Paul was ruled out when it emerged that the feedback from this guitar was worse than my real Les Paul! (An inspection proved that it's humbcker pickups were in fact single coils in a humbucker case! Warning to those who buy cheap guitars with "Humbuckers")
So in a tough choice I picked the Stratocaster. Big mistake. The bastard cut out on me several times throughout the gig. Never done it before, obviously this guitar has a sense of timing. Nothing in the world makes me more furious than onstage problems, it makes me fucking insane with anger!! So now the Les Paul is being fixed, and god forbid anything like this happens again.

The Who pass social comment (by accident...)

Today Chancellor Gordon Brown effectively became Prime Minister of England in waiting. He will take over from Tony Blair when he officially steps down from power on the 27th of June.

What does this have to do with the Who?

Well on the 27th of June, as Gordon takes over from Tony, I will be in Wembley Arena listening to the Who sing "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.." Now that's social comment!

Small Town Life (rough draft of a short story/rock opera..)

This is an idea I had for a concept album. (Wait, where have you all gone, come back!..)

Okay, you still with me? Good.
I came up with a rough idea for a concept album. I then wrote a song which basically covers most of the story but would form the finale of the piece if I ever write it all. At present time I have the opening piece and a few more songs, but I haven't decided to fill all the gaps yet.

you can hear the title song by clicking http://www.myspace.com/dandicarlo2Scroll down the Myspace player if needed, and click on "Small Town Life"

I then wrote a short story to explain the idea. This is it.

To give a brief synopsis, before starting the actual piece, the story revolves around the lives of a small town community on the last day before the town and possibly whole world is blown away by a bomb. The songs tell us of the people's activities on this last day but are in fact seen through the eyes of our narrator, a wheelchair bound teenager who has developed psychic powers as a result of his neurological disease. He sees all, and knows of the town's destruction, but there's a problem....

If you want to know what, read on.

Small Town Life

One

Hello, is anybody out there? I am trying to reach someone psychically. I’m trying to reach anyone who will still be alive this time tomorrow. Even if you do not understand English, understand the images I am trying to put into your head, and do not dismiss them as dreams, as the people in this doomed town of mine have….


My name is Anthony; I am just a normal 19 year old kid, living in a small town somewhere unimportant. I have lived all my life here and know just about every person who also resides in the town. Everyone knows each other and together we live a happy and carefree existence, even the town drunk seems nonthreatening and pleasant enough.
Right next door to me is a girl called Mary, we’ve been friends all our lives. I think in some ways we were kind of in love at one time but it’s hard to say now.
I’ve had other great friends as well, we were all into music and spent most summers out in the park playing guitar and drinking cold beers into the night. I was a late starter on guitar but soon picked it up and became better than everybody else, which pissed them off no end, but we still remained the best of friends.
Usually, at about 11Pm we’d all walk home from the park and Mary would climb into my room and stay there til the next afternoon. Nothing ever went on, we just watched movies and played music but they were the best days ever.

Then a few years ago I had this fall. Nothing serious, but I just lost my balance and fell down in the park. Everyone thought it was hilarious and pissed themselves laughing (so did I in fact). But then it happened again and a few more times after that, I even took a tumble down the stairs. So I went to the Doctor’s and found out I had a condition. It was like MS or Parkinson’s but different, no one had had this type of disease before (I was hoping they’d name it after me!)
Slowly I started to lose co-ordination, and sometimes got the shakes. I looked like a fucking wino before his first can of the day!
Then something odd happened. One day while out with my Mum, we bumped into one of her friends. Without thinking, I just asked her how it had gone at the doctors’?
She seemed a bit taken aback and she asked me how I knew. I didn’t have a clue. No one had told me, it just came into my head. She seemed flustered and said it was just a check up, but I didn’t believe her and suddenly I thought “abortion” I didn’t say it to anyone of course, but a week later I saw a man in town and I knew he’d gotten her up the duff (this woman was married and the man wasn’t her husband)
I realised I had psychic powers (linked to my disease in my opinion) The doctors said they were delusions, my parents thought the same, but every time I met someone I could sense what they were feeling, even what they had done minutes or even hours before we met.
One day when I was sitting with Mary I suddenly grabbed her arm and pulled down her wristband, revealing the slashmarks on her skin. She told me she’d had an accident, but I knew she cut her wrists regularly. She didn’t mean to kill herself but I was still worried. It didn’t help that her dad was a secret scaghead (which I think Mary suspected) and her mum just had no interest in any of the family. Also add to that the fact that her brother was bullied terribly, almost to breaking point and suddenly things came into focus.
Gradually I realised no one in this town was happy, they all had dark secrets that they hid, and I was the only one who could see it. Some of my friends who had always been so cheerful with seemingly perfect families were beaten, abused and depressed behind closed doors, and there were at least 3 murderers in the town, each of whom seemed like the nicest people you’d ever meet.

As time went on, all my friends including Mary deserted me. They didn’t want to spend time with someone who could sense their darkest secrets. It didn’t matter though, the worse my physical condition got, the more heightened my psychic powers became.

Two

As I lost the use of my legs, I became omnipresent. I could see everybody in the town at the same time and I could sense everything they did. I felt in tune with the sky, and the trees and the sun. I could hear all the music passing through the air, until it all combined into a glorious symphony of the mind not the ears. I began fantasising about the day when I could sense things beyond this town, the day I could pinpoint someone in Outer Mongolia or maybe someone in Australia and tell you the colour of their underwear.
But they kept on giving me new drug combinations to slow my physical decline, and in a way I began wishing they’d stop. Maybe it was meant to be this way, and the drugs were leaving me confused.
As each day went by I tried to test my abilities a bit more, I’d sit in my darkened room in silence and feel out the world around me. All I sensed was pain and suffering, boredom and misery. There were a million minds out there, all brimming with possibilities. The things they could achieve, the sights they could see, the feelings they could experience were unlimited. But they were tied down in their mundane bodies, and drowned in their unhappy, pedestrian lives. They looked to my house and pitied me for my condition, but I didn’t need their sympathy. It was they who were really disabled, they just couldn’t see it. And they never would.
I began to wonder if I could teach someone able bodied to tune into the world as I had, but I feared that most would simply deny the existence of what I had to offer.
I had outgrown them, I had evolved, I was a homo-superior as David Bowie once said, and they were just Homo-sapiens.

Three

Something has happened in the last two days, something important that I want you to know. Whether you hear me and believe me, well, that’s up to you, but I need to put all my faith in you and give you that choice.
Two nights ago in my sleep I dreamt something. I dreamt that as our town awoke something stirred in the sky. A great giant bomb poised over the world like a vulture over a carcass, like a great fat poisonous spider descending upon its prey. There it exploded in the sky bringing death to the entire town.
I awoke. This was not a dream. It was a premonition. I did not know how much of the world would be effected by this event but I knew it was coming at 9am the following day, not much more than 24 hours away, and every one in the town would be dead.
I had to tell them, let them know, though doubtless they would not believe me. Still I had to try though, but just one problem. With my new level of power had come another blow to my physical form. I could not speak.

I tried in vain to utter some words, my hands which had long been beyond my control made one last valiant, but nonetheless futile attempt to write. It was no good. My parents rang the doctors who told them that with new drugs they could restore my speech, but in less than 24 hours we’d all be blown away.
I sat there sadly. This world had given me some good times, I remembered those days in the park, playing guitar and drinking beer. That seemed like a long time ago right now. I remembered being with Mary, I remembered the lies of the town which no-one saw through. I sat and tears rolled out all by themselves and down my cheek they went. I wished I could be able bodied again one last time and say goodbye, but I was trapped. I was trapped in myself.

As the day ended, Mary cut her wrists once more. Her brother meanwhile stole his father’s gun as he went out to the park to meet the bullies who would be drinking there just as my friends and I had done years ago. A bullet for everyone…
Meanwhile the local drunk was thrown in jail again, just so he’d not hurt himself and so he could sleep it off. Of course I was the only one who knew what drove him to drink, just as I was the only one who knew why the jailer hated going home to his wife.
Across the town 14 people cried themselves to sleep, 21 plied themselves with drugs and many wished there was more to life. I meanwhile had an idea.

I would reach them psychically. My powers were very strong now, and I felt I could do it. I gathered my concentration, distracted myself until I felt I had no physical form and slowly reached out to them.
I could feel my mind entering theirs, pushing through the doorway and stepping inside uninvited, but they kept on resisting. I struggled for over an hour to get in and then suddenly it worked. I was in the mind of quite a few and they weren’t pushing me out. Then I realised why. They were asleep!
With their guard down I planted the message, whether the time they had left would be enough to save them was impossible to say, I didn’t even know the blast radius and how many would be killed, maybe the whole world would be destroyed. I mentally crossed my fingers. (I couldn’t have done physically even if I’d wanted to)

As the town began to awake a few hours before 9 they all got up with my message in their head, now was the time to see if we could be saved. But of course everyone who awoke had simply had the most vivid dream, and nothing more. I had failed to alert them, and the end was immanent.
It’s so ironic that this is all ending now, just as I have found something beyond the mundane, I think I’ve searched for it all my years, while pretending that my life brought me fulfilment, but as soon as I get it it’s gone. I would have loved to have spent time entering the minds of others in their sleep. I could have filled their brains with knowledge, or the most wonderful dreams. I wonder now if all our dreams were brought to us by someone else like me somewhere, someone trapped in their body with nobody suspecting what was going on in their head. It’s a nice thought, but because of my psychic awareness, I know that nobody supplies me with dreams and I have never made a connection with anyone like me. I fear that I am alone.

Four

As 9 O’ clock approached, I realised Mary was dead. She’d just lost too much blood this time. Her brother had carried out his vengeance and now prepared to turn the gun on himself. Suddenly I realised, we didn’t need a bomb, the town was self destructing anyway.

I was tired with this place, I was trying to save them but for what? Everyone was miserable and so was I. I was tied down by my body. I had found spiritual awareness and no longer needed a physical presence. I wanted to find out more to become more than a man, but I never could as long as my sick and weak body held me prisoner.
I was now on a new journey, into the universe, I was heading into uncharted territory and maybe the rest of these people could too.
Instead of being afraid and sad I now embraced it, this was something incredible and it was happening to me. I said goodbye to the world and good riddance, though it was not the actual world that I was glad to leave but the world of men. I said good riddance to the world man had created, my awful hometown that reeked of lies and lost opportunities. I said so long to the small town life that robbed each of us of our spirituality. I would however miss the sky and the trees, the grass and the animals that roamed free. Each of these natural things had a kind of music that emanated from it, each unique and beautiful. I knew what was out there might never compare, but my crippled body was destroying my soul, so it was now time to let go, I viewed my body as an old castle crumbling away and I was locked inside trying to make an escape before the last remains of the walls came tumbling down.

As the clock turned 8.30, Bob, the town drunk, and the jailer exchanged their dreams and were horrified. They began to suspect, though neither could bring themselves to say it, that it was more than a dream. Too late fellas, I wish you the best in the next world.

It is now 8.50, and the moment of truth draws closer, I can faintly hear a rumble in the sky, though it is inaudible to the rest of my people. But the birds have stopped singing, for they know just like me. I know they do because I can sense it. Long ago I began to sense the feelings of animals, and found that they could feel another consciousness communicating with them. Right now I could feel the sadness from them, and the world seemed deadly silent. I don’t know if it is the world ending, this is my greatest fear. Although I now despair with the lives of most humans, this disease which destroys their potential has not infected everyone. There is still time for you all, but you must survive and realise what survival is. Survival is existing, not something to exist for, you must survive to find what makes existing worthwhile. This is your quest on earth. I hope you are all still here after I and my town is gone.

And so I reach out to you, anyone who is not effected by this event. I reach out to anyone who is still alive to make sense of this. You may not believe me but if you hear of a small town blown up on the news today, you will know I have contacted you and that this is real. If you don’t then perhaps I’m only a figment of your imagination….

Tinnitus

At the beginning of the year I went to Camden to see a gig. The small venue was quite full and pretty soon I found the only spot I could stand in where I could see the band and avoid spilling my pint was at the side of the stage right next to the left hand P.A speaker.
Now I don't know why I did this, for god knows it was loud! Just for the record, you know the sound is too loud when the vocals distort so much that it actually sounds electronic, like a vocoder thing or that effect Cher used on that song a while back. You also know it's loud when your ear next to the speaker starts to hurt. You definitely know it's loud when someone shouts into the ear that isn't next to the speaker and it hurts - but you still can't hear them.
After giving up on blocking out the sound by holding my hand over my lughole, I then think about moving into the crowd. I look over. Several people are drunkenly bouncing through the crowd bumping people - all good natured I might add. However I'm a little skinny bloke. Not only this, but as I look on some guy who's bouncing around, bumps into a mod fella (this was a Jam tribute gig) who then gives him a friendly shove in the opposite direction. I look around and suddenly there's a girl on the floor with a half full pint still in her raised hand. Images of me going over with a pint glass in my back flood into my mind and I stick where I am.
To cut a long story short, I leave after 2 hours plus of aural bombardment, at which point I can't hear too well out of my left ear and get the train home. Because of the noise on the train I don't really notice the ringing in my left ear. I get home and it's still there. I go to bed and in the morning it's still there. I've never had tinnitus that didn't disappear after an hour, this is worrying and it's driving me nuts. The funny thing is, only a few weeks before they had mentioned tinnitus in college!
Over the next 5 days I become convinced it's not going to go away, thankfully I was proved wrong. Or was I?
For the past week or so the ringing is back every night. I don't know whether it's always been there and I'm just noticing it now, or it has really come back. It could be an electrical frequency in my house like the TV, but maybe it's the quiet that's causing it.
Whatever the case, it's not too bad, but it does worry me that at age 23, I've already potentially damaged my hearing for good. And considering I want to play music for a living, could I wind up like Clapton, Townshend and Entwistle?
Strangely as my love of The Who and respect for Pete Townshend has grown, so has the amount of people who tell me I have a resemblance to him. Probably the nose I say. But I once had a perfect straight little nose. Could it be that I've changed my appearance subconsciously with the power of my mind as my love of Pete's work has developed? If so maybe I'm causing my own deafness as well......

More about me and how I got into this music stuff...Part 2

PART TWO

However, I was craving a guitar, I needed to play one. I started looking at pictures of six string beauties and wishing I owned one. I started thinking about saving for a Squire Strat...
I also started buying records of the Beatles again (big bro's had long since been sold) and I was connecting with the music. The songs were great, made me so happy. But they also left me depressed. Why? There was some level that I couldn't connect with, I needed to feel more. I wanted to touch the music, to see it. As good as it was, it just wasn't enough. And then I realised that I needed to create it. I loved the feelings of those other writers but I had to explore my own feelings and convert them into music. As much as I loved those songs there were places I had to go to which no one else would. I had to get inside it and do it myself, and so I decided I'd be a songwriter.

So I tried without a guitar, writing stuff in my head. God most of them were so bad. But I had to. I was going to be in a band and I knew I was never going to be a great guitarist, so I thought let me just learn as many chords as possible and I'll play rhythm and write the songs. After all what if you're in a band and no-one else can write? Your band goes nowhere. At this time as well as being obsessed with the Beatles, I was buying early Bowie and other great artists, I was going out and finding records myself including bits and pieces from the Who's catalogue, they were probably already influencing me.

So one year when I was 16, I'm staying with friends at Christmas and they get a guitar. I'm itching to have a go but I'm nervous about playing in front of anyone since there's not a single song I can play, so every time I'm alone I pick up the acoustic.
My brother tries to show our friend how to play different songs including "Patience" by Guns N Roses and "Behind Blue Eyes" by The Who. So I have a go at playing them, and it actually sounds OK.
For the first time I could work out songs easily, and I was learning stuff every minute. I was playing 6 to 8 hours a day, and I wasn't practicing I was just playing.
Not only that but I was writing furiously, and the songs were sounding good. Music was flowing out and each song got better.
For my 17th birthday I got my first electric guitar, a Les Paul Deluxe goldtop. I got it from Andy's in Denmark street. God I was in love with that guitar, I used to sleep with that beside me.
Amazingly, my guitar playing as well as my songwriting was getting better. I now felt I could write lovely ballads but also ballsy rockers, and I could have the lead guitar chops to bring them alive.
I was now getting into The Who. I'd been aware of them for ages but now I was buying the albums. I was also listening to Cream, The Yardbirds and Peter Green and trying to play lead guitar.
just short of a year after getting my Les Paul I enrolled in the Guitar Institute college in Acton. Really I should have waited, I didn't know enough yet, but I still did well. In college we tackled different songs live. I always felt nervous before getting on stage but as soon as I finished I wanted to get back on. I loved it but I was frustrated that I couldn't play how I wanted to.

While at college I saw the Who for the first time. I'd wanted to see them for a while but hadn't been able to get tickets. The Who spoke to me more than any other band. I'd been writing all these songs dealing with issues of growing up, self esteem, identity and topics like these, when I realised Pete Townshend had already written them. I'd always felt out of step with my fellow humans, always felt that they were all better dressed, better looking, more charismatic, more interesting and better equipped to deal with life. When I listened to certain Who songs I felt it was being said for me and someone understood. For instance, my social discomfort, my desire to get away from groups of people because I felt unable to fit in and function within that situation seemed to be spoken for in "The Kids Are Alright"
I still feel out of place even within my own family which probably comes from being 10 years younger than everyone else, you know sometimes everyone talks about family events that you weren't even alive for...
Anyway seeing the Who live had an amazing impact on me. I'd never heard or seen live music like this before, the energy and power of it were incredible. I had wondered whether the Who could still cut it live and I just wasn't prepared for what they unleashed. I was utterly blown away. I knew I had to play live music.

So I tried to form bands - they broke up. I carried on writing and performing with varying success. Again I'm trying to form a band while at the same time I play in another with a college friend.
But I've found it hard to find good musicians who really want to work at it and actually like good music instead of wanting to be in some arty band so much that they forget to write any music which requires any talent, or even sounds slightly good. I can't stand those acts who want to be different and modern but can't write a decent song. For me the song is king, so if you don't have any good songs no amount of strange noises and odd singing is going to make you sound good. Not to me anyway.

oh well, what a depressing end to this blog... But on the upside - in contrast to my acceptance of the fact that I'd never be a good guitarist, I am now a pretty good one. Well at least I'm a good cheat. I can make it sound like I'm f***ing brilliant with just a few tricks. But that's more than I had hoped for.

More about me and how I got into this music stuff...Part 1

Part one.

I was born in the early 80's, in a time of mourning for the music I love. In fact the year I was born, both The Who and The Jam officially split. I would later come to love both those bands, as they played a huge part in putting me where I am now (so they're the bastards that did it!)

I grew up in a house with my parents, my brother, my uncle and both my mum's parents. I should have known it all along, the house was full of music.
We had an upright piano in the living room. Only no one played it because years earlier a conman of a piano tuner had ruined the whole thing! Sometimes I'd push the keys from underneath and they'd make this horrible out of tune tinkling... (my first foray into modern jazz!) This was such a shame because my mother was a fantastic pianist. Very good at classical stuff (grade eight) I have memories of her playing but it was damn hard on that clapped-out upright. She was also a pretty good singer. She used to do opera and jazz, in fact in later years she nearly drove me insane by singing various Doris Day and Barbara Streisand songs 500 times in a row every day. I like Babs, but please don't get me started on "Woman In Love"...
My grandfather loved jazz. I remember he had loads of Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holliday, Arty Shaw, Glen Miller and other swing records. He had a big reel to reel recorder (in fact he had several) I wish I still had that. I remember all the splicing kits and BASF reels in the second room which was dedicated to playing music. It also had other fantastic audio equipment - Amplifiers, tape decks, turntables and incredible speakers though never a CD player, not even in the 90's.
According to my mother though, his love of 40's music did not stop him from proclaiming Jimi Hendrix a fantastic guitarist or liking certain modern songs like The Who's "Squeeze Box"
My grandfather didn't play any musical instruments but he still knew a lot about music and the way it should be played. He died when I was about 6, so he never really got to see me pick up my passion, I often wish he could've.
My uncle was also into jazz, but more the Miles Davis type of stuff, he also liked a lot of the 80's disco and pop stuff (no, I'm not sure why either..) various rock stuff like Hendrix, Thin Lizzy and bands like The Jam, The Eagles and Billy Joel.
I have to have a lot of thanks for him playing Billy Joel. A lot of people think he's uncool and all he did was "Uptown Girl" and stuff like that, but If you listen to albums like "The Stranger" "The Nylon Curtain" and "Turnstiles" he's written some damn good stuff. His stuff is so cleverly done (even "Uptown Girl" has a tricky and clever structure) that sometimes you don't realise what's going on. But if you are a musician and you understand about the way music works, try and play some of this stuff and you'll realise how it really is. This gave me a lot inspiration songwriting wise, I started thinking about the possibilities of writing something that didn't stick to one key, stuff that changed mood.
My dad didn't play a lot of music but he always wanted to play drums, I on the other hand harboured no desire to play anything, I was a young artist and it was my brother who was the musician.

My brother was 10 years older than me. He was born in the good old 70's and at some point after "The Buddy Holly Story" film was released he became obsessed with the bespectacled 50s rocker. He got a guitar and at age seven was better than a lot of adults learning to play! He then got into the Beatles and at the time I was born he was still playing their records night and day. Thus from my first day, my earliest memory, the Beatles were there. To me their existence has been constant and forever (like the universe) I never discovered them, they were always there!
I came to love them and many other rock groups, I listened to practically nothing from the modern scene. At some point I sort of accepted that all the music I like had been made before I was born.
Then my brother got into Gun's N' Roses and so I did too. I went to see them at Wembley Stadium in 1992 (my first gig had been Billy Joel in 1990)

One day when I was about 7, I was watching TV and on comes this band with a great song that instantly hooks me. The band is called The Jam, it's an advert for their greatest hits CD and the song is "Going Underground" I want the CD, this is the first band that I've gotten into myself. My Uncle and brother know about The Jam and get me the CD that Christmas. I love it, so many great songs, I even like the soul influenced ones simply because I don't know that it's soul.
Over the coming years I grew up listening to a variety of bands but especially Queen and Led Zeppelin. There was also Beatles Live At The BBC, and a song called "The Kids Are Alright" by The Who which I used to hear on my dad's radio when he took me to school. That song has something in it, a feeling which I understood. It still has that power on me today.

By the time I was about 10 I'd had a few attempts at learning guitar. Thing is, although we had a few guitars around the house, I felt more comfortable left handed. I always thought this was because I mirrored the people I saw playing so I did it left handed, but according to my parents, I used to write and draw left handed too. I don't anymore and eventually I learned a few chords right handed on guitar too. Not fantastic at all.
So one day when I'm about 11 I find out that all my cousins are getting guitar lessons, I sign up too and have a few lessons before it stops (and I can't remember why) Anyway it was all classical stuff, English Country Garden, In The Hall Of The Mountain King, etc. I was less than thrilled, oh if only I'd known at the time that The Who had covered In The Hall Of The Mountain King! However, I did get some enjoyment out of it by playing it much too fast and behind my head - a true showoff in the making.
For one lesson I got "Mexican Hat Dance" I later heard Status Quo break into this on one of their live albums, however the version presented to me required complex multiple string finger plucking. I laughed in disbelief...
One week I had a one off rock lesson as a treat, "Layla", "Sweet Child O' Mine" and some other stuff. It was great, and I could play it! I mean even slash had problems with the intro riff to "Sweet Child O' Mine" but I nailed it pretty well! However it was only a one off lesson.

So I quit. I carried on trying to play (I was awful) I got into the idea of wring songs and began writing (again, awful) Then my brother accidentally broke my guitar by accident and I spent a few years without one. It seemed like the end of my guitar playing days...