Elyse Wilson

At the end of my senior year of high school, I decided to take one of the things that I love but which has always been classified as a hobby and use it in a career that I haven’t really heard a lot about: music producing. One of the first things I do when getting to know a person is go through their general taste in music. I ask their favorite genre, artist, song, etc. and I feel like I get to know them a little better in the process. The most interesting part is that it doesn’t matter what they prefer—I tend to be a somewhat judgmental person, but I don’t put anyone into the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ categories based on their music taste. Well, sometimes I do if it’s limited and superficial, but I try not to; there are good things in every kind of music. Artists of every genre put their thoughts into their songs to share them. The lyrical process to me is like taking literature, mainly poems, and bringing out their full emotional value. Music does the same thing as literature in that it connects one person to many. One song means different things to different people, and yet, at the same time manages to communicate an almost universal message. The reason I find more value in music than I do in literature is that while it’s made in such a complicated and interesting way, it communicates its’ meaning simply and clearly. While literature explores all of the details, music connects the same feeling directly without a need to completely understand everything. At the same time, it’s open to people like me who take good songs and dissect them and wonder at how the artist managed to come up with such a composition of human experience.