Article : Simon Penaflora "Midnight"

ARTICLE SIMON PENAFLOR

" Midnight "

Music to me has always been therapy. Listening to music, creating music, discovering new music. Sometimes i feel like it’s an addiction i listen to music in every chance that i get, it always fascinates me thinking that the song that i’m listening to once started as a thought in someone’s head and now millions of people are listening to what was once a thought and even relate to it once they hear it. I started writing songs when i was a kid at maybe 6 or 7, my mom said that i wrote songs almost about everything but the song that i made when i was at that age that i remembered the most was the song that i made about a stray kitten that spent a day in our garage and the other one was about a song that i made for the funeral of my dead fish. Like i said i’ve always been fascinated with music ever since a young age and at a young age i was exposed to different genres of music because of my family when i was a kid i either wanted to be one of two things when i grew up, a racecar driver and a musician. That’s all that i could think of doing for the rest of my life drive fast cars or make music or maybe even both. I took my writing seriously when i was 14 i wrote mostly songs but i would also write poems, short stories, movie reviews and was even planning on writing a short film but i never shared it with anybody. I wrote, produced, recorded and released my first song on the night of my 17th birthday as a gift to myself. Thinking about that night something inside me really just clicked and decided to release something into the world, honestly i did that just for me. i didn’t do it for the fame or the fortune i did specifically for myself because i wanted to have my own song for as long as i can remember, sometimes i’m just like that i don’t have a plan or anything but something inside of me just snaps and i just do it. Just writing this article now is an example of that i was lost of how to even start this for the past 2 weeks and now i’m writing it like i had all of this planned out. So going back i released my first song on soundcloud titled “Red” on November 8 2017 at exactly 12:35 AM making the whole song in just a span of an hour, the next day i woke up with people from my school talking about my song and all giving positive reviews, this was a different kind of high for me because never have i expected people to like the song that i put out because the content was so personal, and to be honest the quality of the song was just so mediocre. But people didn’t seem to care they ate it up and gave praise to it which made me experience a different kind of happiness.

After seeing people relating to and quoting “red” i just wanted to make more music for the people and for me because during my 17 years of existence i have never done anything that had a positive impact to the world. So i kept on making songs and after a year a bunch of different kids from my school and also a few of my friends were also starting to make music, it made me happy seeing how i inspired a whole generation of artists to create all because of a birthday present that i made for myself and that has always been my main goal. My main goal as an artist is to support my family by doing what i love while making a positive impact on the world. To inspire a whole generation of new artists and pave the way like my idols did. To leave a trail of inspiration passing through different generations until the end of my days and beyond. I never wanted to be the “greatest” i just want to be remembered as one of them. I make music to express myself to kind of clean all the thoughts in my head when it gets a little too crowded in there. I make music like how any one of my idols do, based on what status my life is and where my head is at while making a particular song or album. I always find beauty in the struggle like the late Mac Miller said “A little more pain that’s just better music”.