Music. According to Kim.

When I decided that it was time to get back to writing my blog, I decided that I wanted to focus a little more of musical theater. It's something that I've loved for a really long time. I remember going to see shows with my family at a relatively young age and seeing musicals is one of my favorite things. Last year, I dedicated an entire week to The Phantom of the Opera . Last month, I did a write-up about one of my new favorite shows Something Rotten  and now? Now I've decided to dedicate the next few posts to Les Misérables . Les Misérables  was the first musical that I ever truly loved. There'd been shows I'd seen and liked, but there was something so special about Les Mis . The first time I saw it was at the lovely National Theater in Washington, D.C. with a group from my school when I was in 7th grade. I remember sitting up in the balcony and being completely mesmerized by the show. I ended up getting both the CD and the VHS - yes, the VHS - of the 10th Ann...

It's been way too long since I've gotten up a new post in my Music Therapy series and I thought it might be a good idea to go with a theme this time. Namely, beauty and self-image. In this society, it's so easy to get caught in the trap of thinking that we have to look a certain way. To think that if we don't fit in, if we don't look that way, that there's something wrong with us. We might feel insecure. We may feel ugly and unwanted and unlovable. This can lead us down some dangerous paths if we aren't careful. The way I see it, even the most secure of us need some reassurancesometimes. Maybe we don't fit into what Hollywood considers beautiful. That's okay. Maybe we've been picked on and made to feel worthless because of the way we look. That's not okay, but you know what the good news is? Our worth does not come from other people. As a Christian, I believe that our worth is given to us by God. We are beautiful because we're His creat...

This year I decided against picking my favorite albums from 2016. The truth is that I have way too many albums left to listen to and didn't feel like trying to do a mass listening of them all like I did last year. Instead, I've decided to pick some of my favorite music related things - starting with this. My top 10 favorite live music experiences from 2016. Some of these are regular concerts and some aren't. I will say that while there were a few other great shows I went to this year, it was actually very easy to narrow it down to my ten favorite experiences. These were all shows that just stood out to me. I went through and made some photo collages of some of the pictures I took at most of these events. Six, to be exact. Out of the remaining four, two of them were musicals I saw. One was a show where I only got a few pictures that were, frankly, terrible. The last was a show where I could have taken pictures, but was too caught up in the show. Although looking back, I wis...

In the few years I've had this blog, I've written mostly about music that included both singers and musicians. Lately I've written a lot about a cappella music, which of course is music without instruments. But I don't know if I've ever written about instrumental music. This is largely because up until last year, I only wrote about country artists. As I've branched out into the magical world of a cappella music, it only seems fair to talk about some instrumental music. Because sometimes you don't need words. Because sometimes the music itself speaks loudly enough. That is certainly the case with the music from The Phantom of the Opera . If you've never heard of Lindsey Stirling, she is a very talented violinist with incredible stage presence. It's so much fun watching her perform. I have yet to watch all of her music videos, but that said, I feel like this is a pretty spectacular introduction. She arranged this medley herself and did an absolutel...