A soundtrack has always existed for my life; at different times, good and bad and up and down, songs supplanted words and gave depth to whatever it was that I was going through.
I haven't thought about about it much. As I get older with more responsibilities, the music turn into noise, ever present but somehow more in the background.
In middle school, I listened to whatever my brother was into at the time. There were a lot of show tunes. The Carpenters, Barbara Streisand and Whitney Houston were in heavy rotation on the local soft rock station. Mostly safe, the lyrics didn't allude to anything sexual or deviant or Satanic. Raised on a strict evangelical discipline, I primarily set the radio knob to after school Christian radio shows, complete with organs and hymns. Until eighth grade, I thought that most music would cause me to fall into temptation and lead me on the path to damnation.
In high school, I was introduced to BMG and their 'buy 11 songs for 1 cent!' subscription deal. I vacillated between Nirvana and Pearl Jam to La Bouche and DJ Sammy, between the Caucasian crowd and a discovery of Asians in the large Texas public school system. By senior year, I loved going to raves and was handing euro dance mixtapes (Ibiza Party Vol. 2!) to girls that I thought could separate a dorky class president persona I carried by day from an awesome beeper toting Corolla driving tough kid by night. Really, I thought this.
For senior prom, I pushed the school to have Alphaville's Forever Young as our song. Major minor, minor major - the music theory in these songs would have impressed Pachabel. And the lyrics – like "Run away, run away, run away and save your life" – were magnificent. Who cared about such things? I wanted to be carefree and discover things and go dancing with hot Asian chicks.
When I ran away to college, I'd had my fill of the techno scene. The summer of 1997 was one of Aqua's Barbie Girl. "Come on Barbie, lets go party" drilled deep into my brain, and something inside me snapped. Staring out the windows of my freshman dorm, terrified by the new surroundings, I returned to the stadium anthems of U2 and found my way to the top 40 hits that were blaring from the frat houses on campus.
With the coming of mp3s, I waded through porn sites to find tracks from Sugar Ray and Foo Fighters, Nelly and Jay Z, Nickleback and Eminem. It was a weird mixture of mainstream rock and hip hop. The boy bands I bypassed altogether.
My beliefs about God and career and ambition and priorities evolved in college. I kept some ideas and discarded others. I became skeptical of religion and tolerant of morality, valuing analysis but loving creativity in my job, and prioritizing living over planning. My music changed with me. I discarded a lot of the top 40 stuff and kept the sounds I liked: rock, electronica and a smattering of hip hop/jazz.
Hootie & the Blowfish turned into Guster; they got me hooked on Jump Little Children, followed by Modest Mouse, and now the Shout Out Louds. Moby was supplanted by Frou Frou who became The Postal Service, which in turn got me to the National and the Get Up Kids. And Outkast became the Hieroglyphics, which in turn made me jump to Les Nubians and then back to the great sounds of Ella Fitzgerald, Mavis Staples and Annette Hanshaw.
So here I am now, picking up music as I go, discarding less and fine tuning more. Old favorites like Live sit with newer finds like Emily Loizeau.
I'm still learning, still cobbling together songs and lyrics (more so now than before) to figure out how I feel and think about particular situations and people. I listen to less new things, because my soundtrack is getting full and jumbled. Occasionally, here and there, I find a new gem, something that still speaks to me in spite of the cynical varnish of adulthood, and I purchase the track from iTunes, put it on repeat and sometimes even, I'll purposefully take the bus so I can sit and watch the city go by as the soundtrack plays on.