At last! We have arrived at the seventh and final blog in my track by track guide to my (somewhat) new DIY album, Millennials Are Going Gray. Track #7 is “Posters on My Bedroom Wall,” an unapologetically quirky song that’s literally about talking to posters on my bedroom wall. Don’t try to find the metaphor in it, because there isn’t one. They’re literal posters on the wall. And I literally talk to them (or at least I did when I was sadder and lonelier).
For your convenience, you can stream the track on Spotify and YouTube and read the lyrics at the bottom of this post.
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“Posters” is another idea that had been kicking around for a while before I wrote it. It’s the perfect representation of my introverted, timid young self (who honestly still has a lot of control over me today, though I resist her regularly and I’ve achieved many things requiring social skills that I wouldn’t have dreamed of achieving back then).
The literal truth to this song is a bit embarrassing. For some background, I’ve always thought out loud when I’m alone (or think I am), I still do. I don’t know why; I think I just find it easier to organize my thoughts that way, and maybe I also like the sound of my own voice keeping me company.
That’s not the embarrassing part, though. At one point as a teenager, I got rid of a particular poster on my wall because I didn’t like it and didn’t even really like the band on it anymore. But immediately after doing so, I began to catch myself, way too frequently, talking out loud to “myself” but attempting to make eye contact with the poster that was no longer there. I had absolutely no conscious idea of it before then, but somewhere in my mind, I hadn’t just been talking to myself that whole time, I’d been talking to the face on the poster.
I was always a very solitary kid, but to me, this story illustrated that I never was as much of an island as I liked to pretend, and that I had somehow managed to turn the posters into a (poor) substitute for real-life interaction. The song is largely about that, but also more generally about growing up and trying to make my way as a relatively soft-spoken, risk-averse person. I’m getting by. I’ve made friends in the past few years who have only seen me at my boldest and been shocked when I label myself as “shy,” and it feels great to hear that, but it didn’t come easy. It took some grueling emotional work and I still struggle with the same problems today, just to a lesser degree.
In a bit of a nod to my first album, Secrets I Told to a Sound Hole, the last theme that permeates this song is that admiring musicians and surrounding myself with music has been my main constant for my entire life. I used to tell myself that it didn’t really mean anything because everyone has that same passion for music. But as I’ve said in the past, my feelings about music seemed to become more and more pathological every year after high school. Most everyone else moved onto new hobbies, real jobs, and real relationships, and no longer felt the need to listen to music every day, but I just never “grew out of it.” It’s why one day I just thought, this is clearly what I want to devote my life to, maybe it’s not possible, but why not try? I felt that I owed it to myself at least to try.
And I’m pleased to say I know for a fact that 15-year-old me would be very proud of me now.
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SPOTIFY
YOUTUBE
LYRICS
I’m fifteen, I don’t have many friends
I don’t know where I want to be, I don’t know what I want to do
Or if I’ll ever fall in love
I’ve got posters of musicians on my wall
I sit in my computer chair and casually strum a guitar
I say to one of my two dimensional heroes,
“Will I ever figure this out? Will I ever get there?”
They make me feel good, like I can take on the world
But I’m just talking to the posters on my bedroom wall
My twenties, I don’t have many friends
But I know where I want to be, and I know what I want to do
And someday I’ll fall in love
I’ve got posters of musicians on my wall
I sit in my computer chair and casually strum a guitar
I say to one of my two dimensional heroes,
“Will I ever be like you? Will we ever share a stage?”
But when I go to their shows I’ve got nothing to say
Because I’m just talking to the posters on my bedroom wall
And I’m meant to be so much more than this
I’ve got so many songs in my heart that I can’t resist
I never learned how to speak my thoughts out loud
I can only form the words when I know that there’s no one around
I’m meant to do so much more than this
So much more
Than just talking to the posters on my bedroom wall