Six Thin Strings

I got my first guitar for my 15th birthday.

My dad had just moved out of the farmhouse where he lived after he and my mother had split and was looking for houses within our school district. I’d started playing two years earlier and had learned on my mother’s classical guitar and my father’s acoustic Guild that he owned due to an unpaid debt. Both my parents play (though not much and not particularly well) and I had been begging for a guitar of my own since I first started. Being one of five children meant this just wasn’t happening, so imagine my surprise when my reward for sticking with a hobby for two years was to get one of my own.

It was a Yamaha FG-401 and dad splurged on getting me a hard shell case.

It was beautiful. It was perfect. It was going to get me my first Grammy and the folk-rock chick status that would have the whole world at my feet. Or it would allow the guy I had a crush on who played guitar to see my skills and fall madly in love with me, instead of what actually happened, which is me teaching my good friend to play guitar and she using that feature to have him fall madly in love with her and then get married and have two lovely and amazing children and continue to be two amazing people. Whatevs, totally part of the guitar plan.

So guitar became my friend. More than my friend, it was the way for me to express myself. I wrote well over one hundred songs. I wrote songs about EVERYTHING. And everyone. I’d say 98 of them are terrible. Guitar was the way I got comfortable in front of people, pulled me out of the shy bubble I’d lived in up to then. When Natalie found out I played, I was pushed to the front of middle school YL club (or Wyld Life) every other week to lead songs. The very first night of college I ended up playing guitar in the hallway while my new floormates sang along to ‘Closer to Fine.’ It was like a scene straight out of ‘Felicity’ but on happy pills and with less Scott Foley sad puppy eyes.

Over the years I’ve collected a few more guitars. I have three of them in my house now, with another in storage. That old FG-401 is still with me, though I haven’t played it in years. What guitar means to me has morphed. It isn’t the primary way I express myself anymore; somewhere along the way I discovered my own voice. I still play and still very much enjoy the process. I even write the occasional song (still terrible). But I never knew when I got that first guitar 15 years ago how much of an impact it would have on getting me out of me.


(I've been playing this song quite a bit lately. I forgot how good it is)