on the death of my first guitar

reflections on creating music and the commodification of art

The title is misleading. The guitar was never only mine.

My dad bought a guitar from Costco for about 90 bucks in 2000, around the time my parents finally settled down in the United States. I didn’t start playing guitar until I was in 8th grade.

Recently, I returned to my childhood home to find that the guitar had been completely ruined. The strings were wound so tightly that the bottom half of the guitar had been ripped up.

My dad and I tried to salvage it with industrial-strength superglue and Lego pieces to keep the strings in place. Sadly, the bottom half of the guitar was completely ruined, and even after the attempts to fix it, it would fall out of tune almost immediately, the superglue straining and cracking at the wooden plaster.

The way I write about the death of this guitar is very clinical. When I first discovered it in its ruined state, however, I was a wreck. I had just returned to my childhood home for the first time in a while, and just being back in the small town, feeling trapped by the weight of responsibility to my family, was already overwhelming enough. When I saw my broken guitar, I completely collapsed crying.

This had been the guitar I had written my very first song on, a song professing my love for someone who I had a crush on at the time. I sang it to her. Three years later, we would stop talking.

At the very bottom of the guitar was a clump of duct tape residue, left over from when I attempted to make a guitar strap out of fabric and duct tape. I’ve always enjoyed performing live, so when I was in 8th and 9th grade, I had frequent Instagram lives where I would play my songs. To this day, I still maintain that passion for live performance.

Part of the reason I loved that guitar so much is that I suck at production. I’ve never really learned about music production, and the few times I’ve attempted haven’t gone well. I’m someone who really loves the stripped-down sound of just a voice and an instrument. Performers like Laufey, who I saw perform last summer, are an excellent example of how achievable this is.

I’m sure I could learn if I really put effort into it, but a large part of why I make music isn’t to put it out there to gain traction. I usually only play my songs live to people who I trust because what I write is usually extremely vulnerable. I would often write music only when my parents weren’t home as I felt I couldn’t even trust them with my music. The music I write is a way for me to communicate what I feel to the people I care about in an understandable way.

It’s strange to be so passionate about music when I don’t really have much to show for it. I have hundreds of songs recorded in voice memos and stored across Google Docs and my notes app, but I don’t have any of them polished and available to stream anywhere. But oddly, I think that it’s been rather comforting to confine my music to just my small world.

I refused to take guitar lessons in high school. All my other skills, such as the sport I play and even writing, have been commodified in some capacity. My songs feel like the one piece of me that I have control over.

It’s a strange feeling, to produce a creative work and know that at the end of the day, I might be the only person to ever see it. In a world where social media is everywhere, and everyone’s constantly posting about what they’re creating and what they’re doing, the pressure to prove to others that you’re creating something valuable is immense.

Writing music had been a survival mechanism for me. I had believed that it, along with my mental illness, would disappear from my life when I headed to college. Some of the best songs I’ve written have been during my first semester of college.

I wrote “american man,” a song about toxic masculinity, during my first week in college. I snuck into a music practice room and spent an hour putting the chords down to the words I scrawled on post-it notes. I didn’t even realize how badly I missed writing until I realized that I had finished writing an entire song in one sitting, something that happens in the rare instance that I get an overwhelming burst of inspiration.

A month later, I had my guitar, which I had recently bought at the end of high school during a Black Friday sale at Garage Center, shipped from my home because my hands were itching to play the guitar.

This past spring semester, I put on a concert and performed 15 original songs for a room of my friends. It was the biggest audience I had ever formally performed for. The one other time I had performed had been next to a pond during a writer’s meet-up. This time, it was on stage, a proper concert.

It was absolutely surreal. To this day, I still can’t believe that it happened. The concert is something I remember when it comes to gratitude because it wouldn’t have been possible without all my friends’ support and encouragement.

Art is a form of survival. Just my first-ever guitar is dead, but it doesn’t mean that all the songs I wrote on it, all the memories I’ve made with it by my side, are gone, too.

Art exists even without an audience as long as it’s done something for the creator. But maybe sometimes it doesn’t even have to have a function. Sometimes, the songs can just be about being angry that my friend-at-the-time didn’t invite me to a Thanksgiving New York trip or about failing a test.

Sometimes, the songs can just be pieces of me that live both inside and outside of my self. They can be heard and unheard, but they can be allowed to live in peace, undisturbed.