Music & Rituals

Graduations, of any kind, are something all kids in America experience. As someone who grew up in the public school system, there was always the obligatory song at the end of any educational journey. There's the traditional Pomp and Circumstance, (which has always been boring and kinda dirge-y to me) but I've always been more interested in the selection of a song that really means something to someone moving up and moving on. If you want to start way at the beginning, there's definitely a video somewhere of a 5-year-old Fay singing the "Tiny Tots" preschool song in an adorable little cap and gown. 11-year-old Fay sang Bruno Mars's "Count On Me" in an elementary school cafeteria/gym/auditorium with 50 other 5th graders and it felt like the biggest moment in the world to her. Music is incorporated into moving up everywhere.

I normally wouldn't say literally anything about middle school was special because that is the lowest point of grade school. But moving up from the 8th grade was special to me, because I was moving districts. I'm embarrassing myself because this is one of the formative moments of songwriting for me, and it was immigrated with graduating. This song is called "Voice," and the faculty invited me to be the singer at the ceremony, and sing that song. 

This is a performance from a talent show.

Then we move on to high school. High school graduation obviously holds a lot more significance in terms of where your teenage life is headed than middle school does. At the school I went to, the junior class usually picked songs to send the seniors off to because our junior and senior arts classes were integrated. But with Covid, we didn't get to do so - and as a result, the teacher let us pick our own songs as seniors to dedicate to our class. Some of the music majors picked the song "Rise Up," by Andra Day. There seems to be a theme of overcoming hardship (or in this case distance learning) in these moving-up songs.

I spent a long time trying to come up with something non-traditional, something that people don't usually do at graduations. However I fell back onto a classic I couldn't go wrong with - "Vienna" by Billy Joel. This song embodies an idea I find very important when it comes to pursuing the arts, or any career for that matter: if you don't slow down and appreciate the things around you, you get caught up in all the stress and drama of life. You don't have to know the answers to everything yet. And the line that chokes me up the most (quite cynically, honestly): Dream on, but don't imagine they'll all come true.