Inspiration from Victor Hugo and a clean room

So this is my first post on my new blog, encouraged to be set up by my friend Hailey Ray. The purpose behind this blog is to create an venue with which I can express inspiration and progress in my musical adventure. Hopefully I will not make it a place where I waste time and procrastinate, because Facebook does enough of that too me as it is.

A little about me: I will be a sophomore at the University of Arkansas this fall majoring in Music Education and pursuing a minor in Business with an emphasis on Marketing. I play saxophone, piano, guitar, a tad of drums and bass, and am attempting to learn how to sing (we'll see how that goes), and I have no idea what I want to do with my life, except that I want to be in the field of music.

I have a tendency to be very anal about music or musical preferences, but I am learning that just because a genre has a different style and might seem "simpler" than another genre that I might be more used to does not lessen it's validity as good music. I have come to realize that music should speak to people's souls, and the music that I love does exactly that. Whether it has lyrics or not, my favorite songs and pieces all move me in a profound way, sometimes in ways I cannot describe.

"Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to remain silent"- Victor Hugo

I am in the process of cleaning my room right now and creating space to set up a small "home studio", if you will, to create music. I am also in the process of learning how to use Logic Pro, so it might be sometime before I get music out there for whoever reads this blog to hear, but I will, don't worry.

I encourage you to listen to music, and especially to listen to music that you are not used to listening to. I am learning that there is great stuff in genres that I thought I wouldn't like. Folk music to be more exact.

Thanks for reading my blog, and I look forward to hopefully maintaining some creative accountability on this site. Thanks for joining on this journey with me. Let's see where it goes.

God bless,

Jeff Payne