This is my church
Faitless
where I heal my hurts.
Tonight,
God is a Dj.
- I’m really sorry if I kept you listening for so long. I got a bit carried away with the repetitions.
- Hey, let me tell you something.
I´m blessed
Last year, I listened to 48,987 minutes of music on Spotify alone. This figure doesn’t even include the time spent with my LP collection, the 25 hours a week I spend listening to my violin and piano students, music lessons at school, the live music concerts I attend bi-weekly, the clubs where I dance, my band rehearsals, or my performances.
Music fills my days with true blessings even though I don’t subscribe to the idea of an all-mighty being that many refer to as God, so my sense of blessing doesn’t come from that belief. Still, I did reach out to the concept of the almighty when I was a child.
I had a childhood but with adult worries. It reached a breaking point when I had to figure out how to split the dog’s sausage so we both had something to eat. My values were put to the test, and I stood firm in my convictions as a good Christian despite identifying as a pagan. I’ve never been baptised, yet the sausage was still perfectly cut in half, demonstrating fairness, or I saw myself as much as valuable as a dog.
As a child born in the 1970s, I saw different things people believed in. In my neighbourhood, adults saw two paths to follow: socialist or Jehovah’s Witness. I inherited half and half from both sides and like a dog’s sausage, I was cut in the middle and left wandering in a gap of no man’s land.
In this god-forsaken place, drifting the divide between two halves, I knelt on the floor, crossed my fingers, and boldly declared, “Dear God, if you’re listening, hear me now.”
I intended to lay bare my struggles with life, but instead, I confronted my reflection in the glass door—staring back at a version of myself that looked foolish and weak. Anger welled up within me, and fueled by that strength, I rose to my feet and said, “Perkele.”
Years later, in 2013, I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling, decisively questioning whether I was experiencing depression or a curse. My index finger itched to indicate whom to hold responsible, yet my daily thinking pushed me to confront this journey of confusion. In this mindfuckness, I decided that I was depressed—first time in my life.
I confronted the reality of my depression head-on. I analysed it from every angle, feeling its grip on me as it called me into the depths like the sirens of the sea.
No. It didn’t suit me.
“Perkele. I can not be even depressed!”
God or Perkele
You might think that a God or a Perkele saved me in these situations, but no, even though my former partners would say that I was born here to crucify their brains. Maybe I just lived through The parable of the drowning man? No. Neither of them saved me. Music saved me.
After eating half of the sausage, I composed my first song. It had three chords and the lyrics: “Tears of sorrow are cold, but the tears of love are warm.”
After the fake depression, I stood up and looked out the window. I saw the first snowflakes falling, bright against the dark evening sky. I felt the weight of my problems and blamed life, which seemed cursed then. This sadness pushed me to create my first composition, in which my violin sings.
God is a dj
During my teenage years, I worked in a Strawberry field to earn money, and I sacrificed all my savings to buy LPs and, later, CDs. My first real experience of falling in love happened through music with a man with an outstanding collection like mine.
When he selected albums from bands like Cream and Blind Faith and passionately explained what Eric Clapton meant to him, I knew I was in love. We spent countless nights awake, sipping cheap wine, smoking cigarettes, making love, and diving deep into conversations about music. I kissed him for the first time as “I Can’t Find My Way Home” played in the background, lost my virginity to the seducing saxophone melody of “Your Latest Trick,” and we broke up forever when Dire Strait’s “On Every Street ” echoed from his collection.
Music is my constant companion because God is a DJ, and I am the all-mighty. I’m the DJ orchestrating my journey—no one else gets to mix my tracks. Sometimes, I wish someone else would handle the records, but hope alone won’t get me where I want to be.
I have my parish, where life challenges me every day, and I firmly believe there are no wrong notes—only bad timings for those notes. Mistakes are not setbacks; they are gifts that lead us down unexpected paths that our overthinking minds couldn’t imagine. Life and I embrace our unorthodox approach.
When it comes to playing music, it serves as our exorcism, cleansing us of the burdens we carry daily and washing them away with holy water made from sweat, blood, and tears. Music is my church, where I heal my hurts because I am the DJ of my own life.
“Never apologise when playing music,” I said to my student.
Let me tell you a story 
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