What is Searching for Stars?

It's a multimedia memoir — part book, part mixtape, part constellation of memory. Think of it as stories pixelated through sound, image, and nostalgia — a place where music and memory echo together. Imagine getting to know a new friend through her mixtape of memories, each story another piece of a constellation slowly taking shape, like sitting together in a fireside chat beneath the stars.

What does "musical echolalia" mean?

Echolalia is when words or sounds repeat — like echoes that return without being invited. Musical echolalia is how songs and lyrics loop in memory, shaping how we feel, remember, and even communicate. It's the heartbeat of this project.

Is this a book, a blog, or something else?

It's all three, and none at once. Searching for Stars is a living memoir told in fragments — part website, part audio archive, part retro dream. Imagine a mixtape that keeps unfolding into chapters.

Who is this project for?

For readers. For music lovers. Nostalgia chasers. For kids of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s — and for anyone who's ever pressed rewind on a memory. It's for seekers of light in the dark, and for those who feel music deep within their soul. It's for the little girl inside me who dreamed of being a writer, who thought in music video formation and remembered in lyrics long before she had words to explain it. It's for anyone who carries loops of sound and story in their mind and is still searching for ways to make sense of them. It's for my children — the living record of my life and the love story their father and I have built — so they will always know who I was, and how they inspired me to finally share my voice.

The pixel art style was inspired by our kids' love of old-school Nintendo and Sega games — a love my husband and I were proud to pass on to them. Memory itself often feels pixelated — fragments, pieces, little glowing squares that come together into something whole. Vivid sensory-filled memories, retro games, mixed CDs, VHS tapes, and the texture of nostalgia. I usually start with real photos from my life or family albums, then run them through tools like ChatGPT, Canva, and PicsArt, cropping, layering, remixing, and refining until it feels right. The visual art helps bring the stories to life like a pixelated scrapbook.

Can I listen as well as read?

Yes — the site weaves together audio narration, Spotify soundtracks, and pixel art. Each story has its own soundtrack, so you can hear the memory as you read it. You can also listen to the project in its entirety on Spotify, or hear the Searching for Stars soundtrack.

Where should I start?

Anywhere. That's the beauty. The project is a constellation, and you can enter from any star. It never happens in order — it comes in bursts, like shooting stars revealing their story one streak at a time. Certain images throughout the site are clickable, leading you to other pieces that share similar characters, themes, memory vibes, or synced timelines. Small bridges between stories that hum with the same rhythm.

Will this become a book?

That's the dream. Searching for Stars is being built as a digital-first memoir, but its fragments are already shaping into a printed constellation. Someday, you'll hold it in your hands like a mixtape for the soul.

How can I support the project?

Read. Listen. Share. Tell a friend who loves music. Post your favorite piece, or just press play. Every echo helps keep the stars alive.

What inspired Searching for Stars?

It was born from a lifelong love of music, memory, and storytelling — from mixtapes passed between friends, to songs that became soundtracks for entire chapters of my life. It's both a personal archive and an invitation for others to remember alongside me.

Is this project autobiographical?

Yes — it's my story, but told through music, movies, and memory loops that connect to something bigger. While it's personal, it's also universal, because the songs that shaped me are the same songs that have carried so many others, too.

Dashboard: A Marching Band for the End of the World

The floor shakes with every drumbeat. The bass thumps deep in my chest. The guitar wails like it’s pulling all the weight out of my body. I feel it before I even really hear it music wrapping around me, lifting me up, turning all the noise in my head into something that finally makes sense.

This isn’t just any concert. This is Pack Rat 7.

Clint’s on drums, hammering out every beat like the music won’t move without him. Ricky’s gripping his guitar, leaning into the mic, his voice rising above the noise. Daniel’s bass hums underneath it all, grounding the sound, pulling it together.

Pack Rat 7 wasn’t just a band they were my friends.

The ones who gave me a place to belong when I didn’t feel like I had one.

The ones who made music feel like more than just sound it was a place, a refuge, a reason to keep going.

I was sixteen or seventeen when I named it. Searching for Stars.

I wasn’t sure what it would be yet—a band name, a book, a phrase I scribbled in the margins of my notebooks. I just knew it meant something.

Because that was what I was always doing.

Searching for something beyond the wreckage.

Searching for hope, for meaning, for beauty in disaster.

And so, it stuck. A phrase that felt like a promise to myself, to the universe, to anyone else who might need it someday.

Years later, when I first heard Dashboard, I wasn’t at a Pack Rat 7 show.

I wasn’t at a show at all.

But the moment it hit—the pounding drums, the frantic bassline, the brass section blaring like a siren it pulled me straight back. Back to those nights, those living rooms, those concerts where everything felt alive and possible.

“Well, it would’ve been, could’ve been worse than you would ever know…”

I don’t think I realized it at first, but the energy of this song—the chaos, the resilience, the motion it felt exactly like those nights at Pack Rat 7 shows. Like those moments when everything was loud and fast and it felt like nothing could touch us.

Modest Mouse isn’t about clean narratives or clear resolutions.

They write in movement, in disorder, in the strange poetry of things falling apart but still pushing forward.

Dashboard is a song about driving through the disaster.

About looking around at the wreckage and deciding to find something beautiful in it anyway.

Isaac Brock sings it like a half-truth, like a joke the universe keeps telling.

The world may be breaking apart, but the music keeps playing.

The horns swell, the drums push forward, and somehow, everything feels a little less impossible.

I’ve always chosen to see the beauty in disaster.

Maybe because I’ve had to.

Maybe because it’s the only way I know how to keep going.

The road has never been smooth, but it’s always been mine.

I used to fall asleep on Clint’s couch during band practice.

It drove Ricky insane.

“How the hell do you sleep through this?” he’d ask, while Clint hammered out another beat, filling every corner of the living room with noise.

But it wasn’t just sleep—it was safety.

I felt safer on that couch, in that house, surrounded by the chaos of music, than I ever did at home.

The amps buzzed, the drums pounded, the guitars ripped through the space around me—but I could finally rest.

Because I wasn’t alone.

Because the noise wasn’t something to fear.

Somewhere between all those nights the concerts, the practices, the late-night drives, the songs on repeat I learned something.

That life is messy.

That it breaks and bends and falls apart.

That sometimes you don’t know where you’re going next.

But motion is still motion.

Dashboard reminds me of something I had already lived long before I ever heard it.

The way it crashes forward, never looking back, never slowing down—it sounds like being eighteen and thrown into adulthood before I was ready.

It sounds like having no idea where I was going, but knowing I had to keep moving anyway.

Like graduating high school with no real plan.

Like searching for stability in the chaos.

Like Searching for Stars before I even had a name for it.

And maybe that’s what I’ve always done.

Searched for light inside the wreckage.

Looked for beauty in disaster.

Because what else is there to do?

Some things, you see coming.

Others hit before you realize what’s happening.

I learned that the hard way.

I don’t think about it often, but some days, I do.

The way time blurred in the weeks after my body weak, my mind caught between survival and grief.

I barely recognized myself.

I wasn’t sure how to feel like me again after something like that.

The doctors told me I had gotten there just in time.

A few minutes later, and maybe I wouldn’t have.

And then one day, Jamie and I were in the car, driving like we always were.

The window down.

My arm stretched out, fingers moving against the wind.

The song was playing.

“Well, it would’ve been, could’ve been worse than you would ever know…”

And for the first time in months, I let myself feel it.

The weight of everything.

The rush of the air.

The simple, undeniable truth.

I was still here.

I never knew what was ahead.

I still don’t.

But I know this...

The dashboard is melting.

The road is uncertain.

The wheels are still turning.

The songs change. The people shift. But the music remains. And in the end, it’s always been the sound that carries me forward.

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Searching For Stars

She Gave Me a Beautiful Window Back to My Soul: Healthy Is the New Skinny (A letter of light and gratitude for Katie Willcox)

By Lauren Nixon-Matney • February 2, 2026

I don’t remember deciding to look in the mirror. I was already there, half-awake, the house finally quiet in that fragile way it gets after a feeding. Same bathroom. Same light. A body that no longer belonged only to me, still learning its new outline. I tilted my head, not with panic, not even sadness just habit. Like checking a bruise you already know is there. Like waiting for an apology that isn’t coming. What annoyed me wasn’t what I saw. It was how quickly my brain tried to narrate it. The subtle inventory. The mental before-and-after photos. The unspoken timeline of when I was supposed to “feel like myself again.” I remember thinking, with a tired little laugh, Wow. I just made a human. And I’m still doing this. Still scanning. Still measuring. Still standing here as if my body hadn’t just done something borderline miraculous. And the most unsettling part wasn’t the criticism it was how normal it all felt. Like this was just part of motherhood. Like this quiet self-surveillance was simply another thing you were supposed to carry. I didn’t necessarily feel it all at once. There was no dramatic breaking point. It was more like a quiet irritation that refused to go away. The kind that taps you on the shoulder while you’re trying to move on. I remember standing there thinking how strange it was that my body could do something as massive as bringing a whole person into the world and somehow still be treated like a problem to solve. How quickly the conversation had shifted from look what you did to okay, now fix it. I hadn’t failed at anything. And yet, the language in my head sounded like I had. That’s when something finally clicked not so much with anger or rage, but with clarity. This wasn’t intuition. This wasn’t health. This wasn’t even coming from me. It was inheritance. Passed down quietly. Polished to sound responsible. Framed as care. And once I saw that, I couldn’t unsee it. Katie this is where you enter the story… Someone who said the thing out loud that I had only felt in pieces. Someone who named the difference between discipline and disconnection. Between health and harm. Healthy Is the New Skinny didn’t tell me what to do with my body. It asked a better question altogether: What if the problem was never your body in the first place? That question rearranged everything. You gave me language where there had only been pressure. You replaced noise with permission. You handed me tools not commandments and trusted me enough to use them. And that trust mattered. Because the moment I stopped fighting my body, I started listening to it. And the moment I started listening, I realized how long it had been trying to take care of me. It felt like getting this beautiful window. Not to change myself or crawl through but to finally see clearly. I kept thinking about how these things actually get passed down. Not through lectures. Not through rules. But through the tiny stuff. The comments made in passing. The jokes you barely even realize are jokes. The way you talk to yourself when you think no one is listening. Especially kids. Especially daughters. It hit me one night, sitting on the edge of the bed, that someday they wouldn’t need me to explain any of this to them. They would just pick it up. The same way I did. The same way most of us did. Quietly. Without consent. That realization felt clarifying. Not heavy. Just honest. Some patterns don’t need a big exit. They just don’t get invited into the next room. And because of you, Katie, I found the strength to stop fighting myself. To stop trying to fit my body into some mold it was never meant to belong in the first place. To me, you are truly one of the most beautiful women and souls in this universe! Beautiful is the woman who breaks cycles. Beautiful is the voice that replaces shame with truth. Beautiful is someone whose work doesn’t just inspire it liberates. Thank you for changing how I live inside my body. Thank you for changing how I mother. Thank you for helping me choose health over punishment, presence over performance, and confidence that doesn’t ask permission. You saved me in ways you may never know. Thank you so much for opening the window. I’m raising the next generation with it wide open to limitless views of beauty! Lauren