The Luka State, The TVD First Date

“Music… it gave me an identity.”

“Music for me is a relationship that was solidified and blossomed from a very early age, I mean from the age of eight onwards I fell in love with this thing that I didn’t understand—that I was surrounded by on a constant basis. My family, my uncle and my cousins would play the guitar and at family parties music would be a big thing that would get everybody on their feet, would connect people, would make people emotional. From there I realised that I wanted to be the centre of that connection from around eight years old.

So around eight years old I got my first guitar and then from there my love affair with music developed. Then I started to understand music as such a bigger picture, it gave me an identity as I became a young boy, especially through discovering different kinds of music, and this whole new world, and this whole new universe was opening up to me before my eyes, through rock and roll to reggae to soul to grunge to punk to Motown, to all these different genres that I was in control of.

I’d never experienced a feeling like this where I could go out and research, and find music for myself, and the first time upon hearing bands like The Beatles, and how it blew my mind, and the first time I’ll never forget listening to things like that. The first time I ever heard The Doors and Ziggy Stardust, and “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and these songs that encapsulated me with this feeling that I’d never felt before.

It was almost certainly a romantic affair that had me in its grasp, that couldn’t let go, and something that I was trying to make sense of. In my young teenage life that I was just discovering so much music, and finding out how much it meant to me, that it gave me an identity, it made me who I was, it made me who I am now.

I found that through music came fashion, and through fashion came music, and then through listening to music and understanding it and understanding what impact it has on people’s lives, how it made the world go around, it then made me want to be the musician rather than the listener—I wanted to be the creator, and that inspired me to become a musician in myself. Then as you grow through a young boy and you understand and you find your identity within music and you understand what you like and what you don’t like, then you find you start studying who the producer is, how beautifully recorded a record is, how sonically perfect a record is.

Discovering vinyl for the first time when I was a young kid at my grandma’s house and playing with all the Elvis records and Roy Orbison records that I was …wow, what is this, it was a different feeling. That came back to making me interested in how these records were made and the love affair grew and grew and continues to grow. Music gave me an identity, it made me who I am, and it certainly makes my world go around. It’s something that I don’t take for granted, there’s not a day that goes by where I don’t listen to music, there’s not a day that goes by where I don’t create music. It’s at the forefront of my mind, it’s my complete being, it’s in every fibre of my body, and I am who I am because of it.”
—Conrad