Sometimes you don’t intend for things to rhyme and yet they do (just take a look at the title of this post). And then other times - many times - you beg for them to rhyme, to make sense - and they don’t.
How is it that I am thirty-two and haven’t come close to what my childhood, teenage and - let’s admit it - even adult self has envisioned? Am I truly Rita if I don’t identify with what I am?
I know, it’s a bit of a baffling start, a lot of new words, a lot of cold water to swim in. So let’s maybe go ahead and get some technicalities out of the way.
Yes, technically I’m Rita - hello. Technically I live in Berlin and work as a (senior!) business consultant for treasury tech!-nology implementation. All is well. The room that I live in is bright, and cozy, and just your normal successful thirty-something mid-life room, you know. It’s exactly the way it’s supposed to be.
What is not the way it’s supposed to be is that I sing - constantly. Not one day goes by that I don’t sing - be it in the shower, in the kitchen, out the window - tiny bursts of !scandal! in steady lives of surrounding Germans. Walking down the streets and, certainly, in the lobby of my building - you’ve got to hear the natural reverb there to believe it!
I’ve been singing ever since I remember my tiny baby face. Do you know that line from ABBA’s “Thank You for the Music”?
She says I began to sing long before I could talk
Well, that’s me. Apart from that I don’t exclude the possibility that my whole body somehow grew around some supernova-esque ball of love for music.
Had anyone asked me: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, - my answer would have been the same when I was four, fifteen, twenty-six and, frankly speaking - more than ever - now. A singer, obviously.
According to - I don’t know - everybody, this is something to grow out of. If you want to have a successful life, go study economics, or law, or IT. Do you want to be creative or normal?
Ok, dad, I’m going to study economics and corporate finance - but I’ll have no friends there safe for the weirdos. I’m going to be top of my class - but I’ll constantly ask myself “why?”. And ok, I’m going to get a job in consulting - but I’ll spend every shred of my free time chasing the dream of music, the dream I’ve dreamt every night and every day of my existence.
Then again, something is stopping me. Eyeing my first digital synthesiser at age 9, looking up at the poster of Avril Lavigne at thirteen, walking into an underground concert venue at twenty-five - I feel something inside me stopping me.
The thing is, music is for the chosen. Music is holy and that means there is no way I can conceivably have anything to say. You’re either born with it and you know it from the start or you have to stand back and admit to yourself you’re here to listen - so don’t speak.
As far as I could tell, I wasn’t born with it. And so, having moved to Berlin in 2013, I started running in circles around the very core of music. If I can’t make it, I will try to get close to it, I think, to serve it, I think. In the following years I make album covers, write some painfully naïve emails to bands and labels, join a promoter collective, play primitive but somehow wildly successful DJ gigs and start putting on my own indie shows. All because I have to be around something that I will never be able to reach…
…until, one day, a magical character appears who is going to change everything.
The cliff hanger! Rita why???? I’m definitely going to read the next one (that was always the plan).
Btw you’re pretty amazing you’ve experienced a wide range of possibilities as a creative in the music scene! Will you ever write about the indie shows you put together? I’d definitely read that!
You’re the musician who creates silence and breaks silence—people shut up to listen to your captivating stories.