the soundtrack to my life
the soundtrack to my life
this one's for the music girlies
Deciding what song to listen to is sometimes like deciding what to eat for dinner. If there are too many options and none of them sound appealing, it’s an immediate skip, skip, skip. Or if I’m craving something new and outside of my usual, I might ask for a friend’s recommendation. The right song choice just depends on my mood, the environment, the moment – do I want music that fades into the background so I can be immersed in conversation or thought, or do I want to immerse myself in the music?
And because I love to romanticize life, it’s usually the latter. Immersing myself in music is one foolproof way to provoke emotions and amplify memories. And playing out my life like scenes from a movie definitely requires picking the right song to accompany each and every moment. Look at any iconic Hans Zimmer score, or a perfectly curated movie soundtrack. That’s what I want my life to be like: one that evokes feeling and captures me the way I want to be seen.
I want to soundtrack my life as if it were a movie, starting from the beginning.
Like most kids my age, I only really listen to what everyone else is listening to. My dad drives me to school and turns the car radio to NPR or the classical station. Sometimes he puts on the oldies station if he wants to whistle along to the Beach Boys’ Ba-Ba-Ba-Ba Barbara Ann or a well-loved Beatles tune. At home, I flip through his stacks of old LPs and my brother’s CDs of early 2000s pop icons. Before moving homes, we watch Holiday in The Sun so many times that Island in the Sun is embedded in my brain, along with all of young Megan Fox’s scenes.
I join gymnastics for a few years and have a floor routine choreographed to Breathless, which I make my cousins listen to on repeat with me. Following my sister’s footsteps, I also start classical piano lessons, practicing just enough to advance through skill levels and keep my parents happy. A few years later I audition for a children’s choir, singing Dream a Dream in senior homes and churches across the Midwest. Before every performance, I sit in my uniform and diligently wait my turn for someone to braid my hair too tightly against my scalp. I spend these years memorizing the circle of fifths and training my voice to follow someone’s cues. I think I anticipate and dread performing just as much as I do practicing.
I quit choir after a few years but continue taking piano lessons until age 17 at my mother’s request. My interest is mostly perfunctory. Our family spends hours on a weekend reading at our local Borders, and when I get bored, I venture over to the music section and preview random CDs to later borrow from the library. My core friend group right now is deeply into classic rock, and I pretend to understand their obsession with Robert Plant and Ringo Starr. I appreciate legacy, but nothing really sonically resonates.
As I enter my middle school emo phase I purchase one of my very first CDs (the All-American Rejects’ Move Along) and listen to it all year. I’m finally old enough to start listening to 107.5 Kiss FM and learn all of Billboard Hot 100 (someone tell me why Cyclone is the one distinct song I remember from 8th grade formal). When I pick up the 7th and final Harry Potter book at a release party, I also discover the world of fan-made music, affectionately known as Wizard Rock. Being in fandoms isn’t cool yet but J.K. Rowling still is! I’m fascinated by this notion of artists making art inspired by other art.
The music I listen to is starting to truly feel like my own. When Fearless is released in 2008, I’m in my freshman year of high school – 15 years young and never-been-kissed and heart fully intact. I lay down on my bedroom floor and prop my feet up on the wall, staring up at the ceiling as Hey Stephen plays on some 3rd party Youtube video. We’re in the internet age of Myspace music players and early Youtube algorithms. I spend my free time on the internet hunting for the next song worth purchasing with an iTunes gift card (or that I can rip from youtube-mp3).
My friend circle and my music world expands simultaneously as we start exchanging music. We burn copies of our favorite new artists’ albums; curate and decorate mix CDs for each other. (My sister still keeps mine in her Camry – that car is a true time capsule.) Music becomes our shared language: every artist someone else also listens to becomes our exclusive commonality; every song is a secret we’re more than happy to share.
We jam out to the Black Keys’ Baby, I’m howling for you and are charmed into agreement when Vampire Weekend asks us Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma? When my grandpa passes, For Emma, Forever Ago echoes through an empty house as I revel in the raw emotion of loss and loneliness. At night, I squeeze into the backseat of a yellow Mini Cooper so we can roll down the windows and drive around town, Two Door Cinema Club ringing out through its tinny speakers.
We gotta show the world that something good can work
And it can work for you, and you know that it will
One could say being involved in music becomes our whole thing. We form bands and play open mics for fun. We put on an 8-hour music festival and raise $5,500 for a clean water nonprofit. Combine musical forces to cover Home by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes for our school’s annual Battle of the Bands.
That's true, laugh until we think we'll die
Barefoot on a summer night
Never could be sweeter than with you
We are full-fledged teenage concertgoers now, on an unspoken and shared mission to experience our favorite songs live. We buy $5 hellogoodbye tickets to sing Oh, it is love, From the first time I set my eyes upon yours with a crowd and unplugged uke. We drive to the nearest city and stand in a venue so small we always end up right up at the front of the stage, an arm’s length away from Owl City, Passion Pit, Ingrid Michaelson. I convince my mom to drive us to Chicago for a free She&Him outdoor concert, and I return to Chicago the next three Augusts to attend Lollapalooza, a 3-day outdoor music festival. The first year, I stand a few rows from Lady Gaga herself, surrounded by a sweaty fans covered in glitter and radiating joy. Brace myself through a much less enjoyable crowd at MGMT the next day. We study our folded up paper schedules and strategize on how to catch our favorite songs from each indie darling set.
If you’ve ever been to a musical festival, then you know that they are not for the weak. From Friday afternoon until Sunday sundown, we attend multiple sets a day until our sweaty bodies are exhausted. But when we make it to the final headliner, it’s always the perfect closing note: we stand in a hazy field as the intro of Arcade Fire’s Wake Up reverberates over us, moments before our crowd of thousands is released into city streets. Like one big exhale. Before the internet creates cancel culture and music streaming takes over, I think this is what it’s all about. It feels so incredibly human.
I’ve been to so many concerts by now you would think they blur together, but the moment I hear a song live, it takes on a new resonance every listen afterwards. They are somehow no longer just my own. Whether I like it or not, I learn to associate songs with people, a time and place, a feeling…I suppose the matters of the heart are simple like that. A boy leaves copies of two Noah and the Whale albums on my doorstep before he leaves for college, and although we haven’t spoken since, he still crosses my mind as I stand front row at their show a few years later. Singing L.I.F.E.G.O.E.S.O.N under a perfect Chicago sky.
I move to Seattle a few weeks shy of turning 18, and I’m so excited by the concert possibilities now that I live in a real city. One week after orientation, I buy a ticket for A Fine Frenzy and go to the show solo. As I wade through the waters of new friendships and experiences, I remain a diligent concertgoer: I’m bummed when I get a summer internship and we have to sell our One Direction tickets (the same year the boys break up). We go to tumblr darling shows down in SoDo and scramble for Sam Smith tickets at the Paramount.
I’ve (reluctantly) switched over to Spotify by now, not realizing it will soon take the joy out of music discovery for me. I am numbed into music nonchalance by an algorithm. The 1975’s self-titled album plays on repeat in the background. A boy messages me about a song that reminded him of me, and I think about how strange it is that a song (and person) carries the weight of significance only if you hold onto its memories.
In my final days before moving to a new city, we sit in a grassy park as the Lumineers play the transcendent piano notes of Patience. It’s an honest interlude that closes out my coming-of-age and takes me into my 20s, where my understanding of the world recalibrates on the daily. I wonder if the 9-5 cadence is all life has to offer.
Spotify kindly tallies up my top plays for me at the end of each year – not that I asked for it – and I learn what songs I hyperfixated on. By now, I have a whole catalog of go-to albums: comfort-listens (Fine Line) and punch-in-the-gut-listens (Stranger in the Alps) and chasing-a-feeling-listens (Heard It In A Past Life). When the world shuts down, I scroll through my photo albums until I find my last concert: Clairo at Brooklyn Steel, November 2019.
27 months later, I see Clairo perform again at Radio City. I get to attend not just one, but two BTS concerts before they go on hiatus, and think about how many other artists I might never see perform in my lifetime. I’ve forgotten how much I missed live music and performance, and everyone else in the crowd clearly feels the same. The energy for this new era of concerts feels electric. I find myself constantly reminded of how delicately human it is to need – crave – shared experiences.
In May, I buy an extremely last-minute ticket to see Taylor Swift for the very first time. She sings Enchanted to a glowing purple stadium and I cry, overcome by how profound it feels to hear this song 13 years older but wondering if I still believe in fairytale endings. When she sings Holy Ground, it’s like I’m 18 again and remembering how hard it was to try and embrace a new future while holding onto a former love.
Spinning like a girl in a brand new dress
We had this big wide city all to ourselves
I wonder how cathartic and validating it might be for her to share songs written about her own life, performing them as a question of does this resonate with you?, and hear an entire crowd singing back their own answers of yes. I suppose it’s not terribly different from me writing this in my own room and sending it out into the abyss of the internet. To an audience, making and sharing art seems brave and vulnerable. To me, I don’t know if I know how to do it any other way – how do artists make art about their own life that isn’t heart-on-sleeve?
I’ve spent more than half of my life turning to music when I didn’t have the words to explain how I felt. Even if I have the words now, music is still a part of the way I move through life and how I write about the world. And as my friends and I realized early on, I truly believe music and art – like many things in life – is best when shared.
Listening to Speak Now (Taylor’s Version, duh)
Next concert Maggie Rogers
Last watched Past Lives
Last read Breezing through many easy plane reads, especially now that I’m using Libby! The Summer I Turned Pretty series (in prep for the new season), The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (loved), I’m Glad My Mom Died (fine)
Artist friends to give a listen Sea Lemon and eliza elliott