Moments of Music

My friend Emily recently took an education class wherein she had to write about the books that changed her as a reader. This got me thinking about all the things that make us who we are: books, music, speeches, television and conversations; they all change us in some way and form us into the person we have become. So, while I’ll probably do a book-version of this (and probably over at Literary Transgressions), here is my musical life-moments and how they made me the musical creature I am today.

Pre-1989: I don’t remember a lot before 1989 (musically or otherwise), but I do remember my mom singing “You are My Sunshine” to me a lot. This is substantiated by a story she likes to tell about a cross-country all-night flight we took when I was two or three. The plane was filled with a bunch of crabby businessmen and, as Mom and I were the only two people on the plane who didn’t care about the stock market, we apparently got a lot of glares throughout the night. But as the plane came in for a landing and the sun rose over New York, I apparently started to sing, in the middle of the hushed quiet of the airplane, my own little rendition of “You are My Sunshine.” Needless to say, I won the businessmen over.

1989: Following the success of my one-night-only engagement singing on the airplane, I proceeded to write my first song, featuring such Dylanesque lyrics as “Well, a desert is a desert, but you’ll never see a desert/Whysackyergone!” The infectious tune proceeded to be stuck in the confused heads of my devoted fans for years to come, almost all (myself included later) wondering what the heck “whysackyergone” was.

1991: A family vacation to Yosemite National Park provided five-year-old me a perfect opportunity to be quintessentially my generation when I spent most of the vacation plugged into my tape deck Walkman (heck yeah!) listening to “Little Mermaid” soundtrack. To this day, “What do they got? A lot of sand!/We’ve got a hot crustacean band!” often reminds me of Sequoya trees, pine needles, and the beginning of an ongoing and beautiful relationship with Disney soundtracks.

1995: By the mid-90s, I was listening to soundtracks and (oddly) Cat Stevens almost exclusively. It was 1995 and I was goofing around with my cousins in their basement in Indiana. We were lip-syncing to some music and just generally being silly. I didn’t know most of the songs, but that didn’t stop me from being a goofball, until the song changed and “You know you could have been a candle…” (1) boomed out of their speakers. I was completely entranced and from that moment on, I was hooked on Motown and oldies music from the 1960s. The Beatles, the Monkees, the Fifth Dimenson, the Mamas and the Papas and Oldies 104, the local oldies radio station, followed. To me, it seemed like I had discovered a magical new world of music that resulted in me knowing absolutely nothing about pop culture or the music the rest of my age group was listening to, but having a precocious knowledge of Beatles trivia. (“Hey, Dad, wasn’t that song on ‘McCartney,’ not ‘The White Album?’” “Um, yeah, I guess it was…”) This was beginning of the era when I thought people talking about Marc Anthony, meant the guy who loved Cleopatra and when they said “Leo,” they meant “da Vinci,” not “Di Caprio.”

1998: A few years later, I was increasingly frustrated by the fact that there were never any new or different songs on the oldies radio station and started rooting around from something else. Fortuitously, the late 1990s were a veritable golden age of alternative rock, so it didn’t take long before I discovered Alice 92.9 (still, in my opinion, the best radio station ever created). Just like it had been with the Temptations in my cousins’ basement, “If you would step back from the ledge my friend” was all I needed to hear of Third Eye Blind’s “Jumper” before I was hooked. I went from being the girl who, when someone laughingly explained a word association game as “We went from Seth Green to Savage Garden!” and I densely wondered how a garden could be cruel, to rocking out to the Goo Goo Dolls, Third Eye Blind, Matchbox 20, the Barenaked Ladies and almost anything on the Canadian radio stations we got because we were so close to the border.

2000: By 2000, alternative rock on reached its zenith and I was entrenched in love for “Bent” by Matchbox 20, “Everything You Want” by Vertical Horizon and “Absolutely (Story of a Girl) by Nine Days. We had cable by then and I spent every morning before school glued to Vh1 watching all the latest “You Outta Know” artists and videos. Frankly, it was all musically downhill from here.

2004: In 2004, I went away to college and, like most first years, was immediately struck by how adult I was and how much mature I felt as compared to high school. I saw “Garden State” a week before classes started and I immediately began pretentiously referring to it as “the movie of my generation!” I got the soundtrack almost directly after seeing it and proceeded to immerse myself in the indie rock of Zach Braff’s choosing. I was delighted that there was this whole new genre out there for me to discover and tried to poke around and find more music I would like by the indie rockers I was now constantly listening to: the Shins, mainly, with some Colin Hay, Cary Brothers and Nick Drake. I ended up sticking mainly to the “Garden State” soundtrack and its chill tunes came to define my first semester at college.

2005: By spring, a roommate détente allowed my roommate and I to amiably spend a lot of our time listening to the “Almost Famous” soundtrack. It was one of her favorites at the time and it introduced me to a world of oldies I had never explored. Indeed, there was something beyond the 1960s and she opened the door to me into the 70s rock of Led Zeppelin, Yes and Thunderclap Newman. That spring, to me, will always be defined by the easygoing, semi-drugged out chillness of the Beach Boys’ “Feel Flows.”

2006: As I went through college and actually matured, rather than just being a week in and thinking I had, I finally started coming around to the music my parents had always loved. Summer 2006 was the peak of this, when I discovered James Taylor and, to my surprise and pleasure, my newfound study abroad friends loved him, too! Who knew? This came after the discovery of Carol King (earlier, in high school), Joni Mitchell and Aaron Copland and a resurgence in popularity for my old favorite Cat Stevens. Summer 2006, my summer in England, will forever be associated in my mind with “Mexico” by James Taylor, a new-found favorite and something we listened to endlessly in various stairwells, buses, dorm rooms and gardens. It was something everyone could agree about and I loved it.

2008: In the autumn of 2008, I had been out of college for a few months and had got my first “real” job in New York. It was at the beginning of this new life-phase that I discovered “The Darjeeling Limited” soundtrack. Like the “Garden State” soundtrack before it, I listened to intensively and it came to define that moment in my life. Maybe it was because everything felt so foreign that I felt compelled to surround myself with Hindi music or maybe because the Kinks felt comfortingly familiar even though I’d never heard their songs before. Either way, it defined me for a season. I also spent a lot of time listening to really mellow stuff as I tried to acclimate, get through personal issues and not freak out all the time. Iron & Wine, old Sheryl Crow stuff (“Strong Enough” mainly and obsessively), Jack Johnson and slow rock all comforted me, particularly as I stood on the roof of our building, wind tearing at my hair, thinking hard and feeling both the community of a big city and terribly alone.

Today what am I listening to? Well, after a brief Beatles kick prompted by a subway singer who only did Beatles music, I am now back on the Goo Goo Dolls’s “Dizzy up the Girl” and am increasingly convinced that the late 1990s was the best music ever recorded. It has become what the 60s were for my parents and that provides a nice kind of symmetry.