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.

Stars: Lost in the Orbit of Sound

The first time I heard Stars by Hum, I was sitting in my brother’s car outside our dad’s house in Lake Charles. It was just after Christmas, and he was about to drive me home to Texas, back to whatever version of reality waited for me there. But for a moment, we were just sitting—him in the driver’s seat, me in the passenger’s—while the thick, hazy distortion of the opening chords filled the car.

I remember feeling the weight of it immediately. The guitars weren’t just loud they were consuming, like standing too close to something massive, feeling its pull. And yet, floating somewhere above all that heaviness was the voice distant, detached, almost weightless. It wasn’t like anything I had heard before. It didn’t try to pull me in; it just existed, vast and cosmic, waiting for me to find my own way through it.

Then came the words:

She thinks she missed the train to Mars, she’s out back counting stars.

Something about that line felt like it had been written just for me. I didn’t know why. I was 14, and I didn’t have the life experience yet to understand what it meant to miss something you never really had, but I felt it all the same.

Music, Memory, and the Weight of Sound

Hum’s You’d Prefer an Astronaut had come out years before this moment back in 1995, when the alternative rock scene was in flux, shifting between the last gasps of grunge and the rise of something more sprawling and atmospheric. They weren’t exactly shoegaze, but they weren’t quite grunge either. Their massive, layered guitars and existential lyrics leaned into space rock territory, creating something heavier, more immersive. Hum was one of those genre defying bands existing in the space between a band that built soundscapes as much as songs, layering crushing guitars over melodies that always seemed to be reaching for something just out of grasp.

Stars was their closest thing to a hit, but it never really broke into the mainstream. Instead, it became something better—a song that lived in the margins, passed between people like a secret, like something only those who truly listened could understand.

That’s how I heard it, my brother was the one who opened this world to me, who made sure I wasn’t just consuming whatever played on the radio. He was in a band. He had the kind of taste in music that made everything seem more important. And as I sat there in the car, hearing Stars for the first time, I felt like I had been let in on something bigger than myself.

I wanted to live in the sound of that song. I wanted to understand why it made me feel like I was floating and sinking at the same time.

Distance, Longing, and the Meaning of “Stars”

The lyrics to Stars feel like a dream half remembered. They don’t tell a straightforward story, but instead, they paint a picture of longing, admiration, and cosmic detachment.

She thinks she missed the train to Mars, she’s out back counting stars.

It sounds like someone watching another person slip away not in a dramatic way, but in the kind of quiet, inevitable drift that happens without either person realizing it. There’s something beautifully tragic about that image standing outside, staring at the sky, believing you’ve missed something monumental, but being too lost in thought to move.

At 14, I couldn’t quite explain why that line stuck with me, but I felt it. Looking back, I think I was already beginning to understand what it meant to stand on the outside, watching life shift and slip away. My brother and I had been through so much by then. The first half of our childhood felt steady, familiar...but after our parents’ divorce, everything splintered. Loss became something we recognized too well. Travis. Tommy. Nanny. Trey. Names that once filled our world, now just echoes. We learned young that people don’t always stay, that life has a way of changing without asking permission.

Maybe that’s why Stars felt so big to me. It wasn’t just the sound—it was the feeling of standing in the middle of something massive, trying to make sense of where you belonged inside it.

Built to Spill, Burned CDs, and the Language of Music

Before he left to drive back to Lake Charles, he handed me a stack of burned CDs— Hum, Built to Spill, Cursive, a few others scribbled in Sharpie across the discs. ‘You’ll love these,’ he told me. And he was right.”

If Hum felt like weightlessness inside a crushing atmosphere, Built to Spill felt like motion loose, sprawling, unpredictable. Where Hum sounded like watching something from a distance, Built to Spill sounded like running straight into it, arms open.

There’s Nothing Wrong with Love became one of my favorite albums of all time, but at 14, I didn’t know that yet. I just knew that this CD in my hands was important. That my brother had given it to me. That this music was going to mean something.

The Gift of Music and the Ones Who Carry It

My brother has always had an ear for music not just listening to it, but playing it, absorbing it, understanding it in a way most people don’t.

When he was 14, we were at our cousin’s wedding, and a woman was playing the piano. He sat next to her, watched her hands move across the keys, and when she got up, he slid into her seat and played exactly what she had played.

She turned back, surprised. “I thought you said you’ve never played piano?”

“I haven’t,” he said. “I just watched you.”

Some people don’t just play music they breathe it in, let it live inside them. My brother is one of those people.

Bobby gave me my first guitar. I toyed with the idea of being in a band in high school—picked up a few chords, even convinced myself I might have potential. (Spoiler: I did not.) Some people are born to make music, and some of us are just really good at making mix CDs and overanalyzing lyrics.

The Circling Course of Stars

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard Stars since that first listen in my brother’s car. Maybe hundreds. Maybe more.

When I was 14, Stars made me feel like I was floating through something bigger than myself. Now, even as time passes, the lyrics and the sound still move through me. It’s a quiet kind of peace standing outside, looking up, knowing the stars are still there.

Music is strange like that. Some songs stay with you, orbiting your life, waiting for the right moment to pull you back in. They become part of your DNA, tangled in the places you’ve been, the people you’ve loved, the memories that never really fade. And when they resurface sometimes when you least expect it they remind you of who you are, who you were, and who you’re still becoming.

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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