It’s hard to believe the end of school is just around the corner and I am about to wrap up my time as a college student. The memories I have made in the last six months with my friends at school and outside of school have been the best memories I’ve made since I can remember.

This past year has also offered me an opportunity to do a lot of self-reflecting on how far I’ve come as a person and where life will take me next once I walk across the stage with my diploma. When I returned from my summer vacation, I was thrown into the midst of things. I knew that I wanted to go into storytelling but did not know which point to choose as my starting position.

Creating content that people found interesting was something that I knew I wanted to continue to do and I wanted to explore what more I could do with my creativity. So I decided to dip more into topics that I bonded over with other people and decided to start creating audio documentaries and podcasts based on those niches. With that as motivation and the excitement of getting to use these ideas for school, my first major idea was to explore the history of the Canadian rock music scene through history.

I was fortunate enough to interview my grandfather who was the manager of The Gasworks, the hottest rock bar in Toronto during the 70s and 80s. He told me stories of meeting some of the most iconic musicians the world and Canada has ever seen, like how he would allow Rush to practice overnight in the bar before their bog Saturday night gigs.

He also talked about what it was like touring provinces looking for upcoming bands to play at the bar and the overall business of it as well. Once I knew I had the business perspective for the documentary, I shifted my focus to a musician and got to meet and interview the lead singer of the Canadian metal group Helix, Brian Vollmer.

The highlight of this interview was discussing his band’s rise to fame, from playing at small venues of 50 people to then playing in front of thousands. He also discussed how integral a band’s chemistry is when it comes to working in the studio, performing live, and how special it was to be with them doing what they all loved doing as a career.

Completing this project was when I realized I wanted to go deeper into the music scene and see what more I could do. The local scene then became my new playground to explore. I started to look in London and at Fanshawe, where I was introduced to a local band out of the Music Industry Arts program, called Carmine.

After interviewing them for a podcast, it opened my eyes to start surveys of the many local music scenes around London and surrounding cities in the province. Many of the bands were like finding hidden gems in a cave, with their sound becoming more infectious than the stuff bands in the mainstream were releasing.

Doing further research into these bands then prompted me to write an article for the music issue this past year, encouraging students to listen. The post detailed good Canadian indie bands with great music to listen to and make a nice welcome into the indie band world.

Having the creative freedom with projects gave me the motivation to explore what options I had in my mind and manifest them into reality. It taught me to not hide the crazy things my imagination would come up with and gave me an auspicious edge to transition what ideas I had in my head to make an engaging article or audio piece for others to enjoy. It gave me an avenue of music journalism to explore in hopes of being able to continue this path into a career.