The Language I Was Born Speaking

I have spoken Danish my whole life. I have stumbled through English, charmed my way through a little German, French and Spanish. But there is one language I have never had to learn — because I was born already fluent in it.

Music.

Not the theory of it. Not the scales and the notation and the technical vocabulary that music teachers try to install in small, restless children. I mean the language underneath all of that.

The one that lives in the body before it ever reaches the brain.

The one that knows exactly what you are feeling before you have found the words for it yourself.

I wrote my first song before I knew what I was doing. I just knew that something inside me needed to come out — and that speaking it, writing it, even crying it wasn't quite enough.

It needed melody. It needed to move through the air differently. It needed to become something you could hear.

Fifteen albums later, I still feel exactly the same way.

People sometimes ask me how I ended up doing so many different things — the music, the writing, the art, the whole world of SheStartsAt50. And the honest answer is that I never really separated them. They have always felt like the same thing expressed in different forms.

A song is just a feeling that chose melody.

A painting is just a feeling that chose colour.

A book is just a feeling that chose words.

Music was simply the first language I found.

And like all first languages — it never really leaves you. Even when life gets loud and full and complicated. Even when there is no time to sit at the piano or pick up the guitar. Even when years pass between albums. The music is always there, running quietly underneath everything else. Waiting.

I think that is true for a lot of women.

Not necessarily making music — but having music. That one song that gets you through. That album that defined a whole chapter of your life. That melody that comes back to you twenty years later and takes you straight back to the woman you were then.

Music remembers things we try to forget. And reminds us of things we should never have let go.

Welcome to the Music Room.

I am so glad you found your way here.

@shestartsat50 There is always room for you here. 🌸