BLAVITY: OPINION – Music Education Changed My Life, And Other Students Should Have That Opportunity, Too

By Sage Bond

If music had been offered more during my secondary education, maybe I would’ve been more prepared and confident?

In second grade, I was given a class assignment to write about what we wanted to be when we grew up. My classmates wrote things like astronaut, police officer and doctor. I wrote that I wanted to be on stage and perform.

How did I know this would happen years later? I was a shy kid, born and raised on a reservation, and I grew up not within but near the largest city on the Navajo Nation, which some may consider a small town. My parents gifted me my first electric guitar on my 11th birthday after years of playing on a plastic one. Every day after school I’d come home, do homework and spend hours in my room practicing and finding the right distortion effect for my guitar by stomping on my FX pedal. I wanted to be a lead guitarist for a thrash metal band. I also started to sing.

Growling and yelling my guts out in my room, I can’t imagine what the neighbors thought was going on in our house. It hurt my throat, but I felt accomplished with what I had taught myself so far. I listened to metal music religiously. A few years later, I finally picked up the clean singing and started to go to karaoke with my mom. One of those nights, a country band member noticed and asked me to sing at one of their shows. I brought my guitar out there with me, pretending I knew what a C chord was, watching for the changes in their hands. I wasn’t even plugged into an amplifier.