Junior Leah Joseph‘s passion is playing the guitar. In addition to playing for fun, she is the leader of her own guitar club at school, and she started a band called Parallax last summer with juniors Kayla Egan and Devin Bratkiv.

Q: When did you start playing the guitar?

A: I think I was 12. My dad played and I really liked it, so when he was playing, he asked if I wanted to try. I’ve never taken lessons — he taught me my first songs and I kind of went from there.

Q: What do you love the most about it?

A: It’s a good way to express myself in a way different than everyone else does. I have a lot of friends that sing, and I can play the guitar for them while they sing — with the guitar you can do so many things. I bring the guitar with me almost everywhere I go.

Q: What made you decide to start a guitar club at Southwest?

I was kind of involved in stuff [at school] but I wanted to do some more, and a lot of people had told me that they wanted to learn how to play, so I decided to start a club so everyone could.

Q: What do you like to play the most?

I like to play acoustic most of the time, and I like alternative music. I write my own songs also. [I started writing my own music] about two or three years after [I started playing] because I kind of had to get the basics of guitar down first.

Q: Why is music important to you?

I played the saxophone since 6th grade and I like singing also. [But] you can’t really play and sing the saxophone — it doesn’t really work.

Music is a way to express myself, and I really don’t have a lot of ways to express myself. I feel like it’s one of the things I’m best at, and without it, I don’t know what else I’d be good at. I don’t just like to play music — I like to listen to music. It helps me with school and it helps me with everything else.

Q: What role do you think music will play in your future?

For college I kind of wanted to go a more academic route with engineering, [but] I’ve always had a dream of going to a music school for college, and if I had the opportunity, I’d definitely love to. I wouldn’t stop [playing music] even If i did something academic — I’d keep my guitar wherever I went. That’s what I do now.