The Soundtrack To My Life...

So I was sitting in the bar the other day when I heard the Def Leppard song "Pour Some Sugar On Me." Like most people my age, the song is a life long staple, it's one of those songs that you have always heard for as long as you can remember. It got me thinking how much my life has changed in the last 20 years but there are still songs like that, that I've been singing forever. I remember the moment I first heard that song in 1987 when I was 5 years old at my day care. One of the older kids (he must have been 9 or 10) had a walkman and a Def Leppard tape. He let me listen and I loved it. That song, along with many others by bands like Poison and Bon Jovi got me through the late 80s.

Then thoughout the 90s as I grew up, music changed and so did I. Bands kept coming into my life, but unlike a lot of people who get rid of cds or get sick of cds and sell them, I kept mine. I have kept every cd I have bought since they first started getting popular when I was 9. I remember my first cds. It was Sept. 15th 1991, my 9th birthday. My dad took me to Kmart and I got a discman and 2 cds: Bon Jovi's, 'Slippery When Wet,' and Kris Kross' Totally Krossed Out. I still have both of those cds along with every other cd I have bought and burned since then. I have lost a couple here and there but for the most part they remain intact in a collection of almost 700.

It's amazing to look back on songs and see how they have changed or not changed as I've gotten older. "Pour Some Sugar," for example, used to give me the biggest rush in the world. I would immediately go outside after hearing it to hop on my skateboard while the song was still fresh in my head. Now the song has a similar effect, only it has turned into me standing on a chair at the bar, drunk of my ass, singing along with all the other people who remember what it was like to hear that song in 1987. I got thinking about all the songs that I have heard in my life and how many lyrics I know to songs I don't even remember until I hear them playing on some random jukebox in a dive bar I stumbled into. Music, for me, has the ability to take me to the point in time when I first heard the song or expose a feeling or memory in me that I had all but forgotten. When I hear Bon Jovi's 'You Give Love a Bad Name," I think of how much I used to love that song (and still do) but also the memory of me sitting listening to the radio with my fingers on the record button (before I had the cd) just in case I heard the song on the radio and my brother making fun of me for declaring it 'my favorite song in the whole wide world."

I'm not sure what it is that I love about music so much but I assume it is it's ability to capture a moment in my life. As if that cd not only has digitally recorded that song but also a specific memory of mine. It moves away from 'What's your favorite song?' to "where were you when you first heard this song?" Sometime's it is whole albums that bring the memory or just the idea of a certain band. My old roommate Bill and I had a particularly dark few weeks in the late winter of 04 when we got sucked into Elliott Smith's "Songs From A Basement." That album blew our minds away and we stayed there in the dark for weeks playing Halo and not really having too many happy thoughts. To this day listening to Elliott Smith reminds me of the depths of those few weeks and the relief that Phoenix's album "Alphabetical" gave us.

The cool thing is that there is so much music in the world that there will never not be something new and exciting and mind altering for me to hear. New memories to have. I'll hear a song tomorrow that I've never heard in my life and it will mean something to me. I bought Vicious Vicious' new(ish) album a couple days ago and put it on for the first time as I began to write this blog and I love it. It is very good an will no doubt inhabit my cd player for the next couple weeks and as I listen to it a year or two from now, I will likely remember my first spring in NYC and listening to it on my ipod as I walked through Chelsea.

As always, get your feet off the ground and reach for the stars. Go big or go home. Pain heals, chicks dig scars and glory lasts forever. Carpe diem. Your heart is free, have the courage to follow it.

get your tunes on
-M, p & z

oh ps - i stopped myself from rambling a lot on this blog so expect some return to music discussions along this line coming soon. it might not be succint but it stayed on a single topic, eh?