My Life Sounds Like This

I was born into loving and needing music. It is likely that the first music I heard as an infant was the “Weigenlied (Lullaby),” by Brahms. Its gentle cadence transports me back to when I was a baby, swaying in a rocking chair in my mothers arms as she sang her tailored lyrics to the tune. I can almost feel the warmth and safety of my mother’s arms holding me and her fingertips gently caressing the skin around my eyes and brushing my eyelids. The magic composed of her voice, heart beat, and love would seal my eyes and tip me into sandman land.

Music’s sway on my soul grew. On the long, vacation drives to Hurricane, Utah, during my 4th to 6th grade years, I remember laying down in the back of our Chevrolet Celebrity looking up out of the half-domed rear window and gazing at the stars while listening to “Symphony No. 40,” by Mozart. The classical tapes would play over and over, but I never got tired of listening to them, as I would either tap my feet to the rhythm or swing my arms to every memorized movement and note, conducting the orchestra and feeling the swell in my chest with each crescendo and experiencing the melancholy that drove the composer to create.

Inevitably, my musical tastes expanded beyond the classical genre and Jonny Mathis Christmas songs. While growing up, my many siblings and I got caught up in the melodramatic ‘80s rock ballads that synthesized their way over the radio and into our innocent hearts. I remember dancing around the family room, shooting my arms out and jumping back and forth to “We Built This City,” by Starship, while my siblings flailed themselves around me. Being the middle child and between the two girls in my family, I was always on the look out for something that would set me apart from the rest. Thus, after watching some unknown butt rocker on the TV jump off of an amplifier and land in a half-splits, I decided that I could do the same—and did. Even my older brothers were impressed, and praise from them was like rain to a Saharan nomad.

Listening to this song now makes me visibly squirm in my skin and experience fits of emotional distress every time I’m submitted to its undeniably dated tones. As I grew into the 90s, it seemed to me that much of the 80s music, most modern country music, and anything on “Easy Listening” FM 100 attempted to force-feed listeners inflated feelings of excitement, romance, or sadness. More and more, I started to seek out rhythms that would compliment my mood, instead of ones that threatened to alter or create it.

En route of this exodus, I purchased my first CD: Vitalogy, by Pearl Jam. The mood and chorus of “Nothing Man” meshed with how I felt walking down the halls of my high school, taking notice of how ignored I was by all of the beautiful girls, and steaming with envy for the confident smiles sported by the guys they were talking to instead of me. My self-revulsion would simmer under the surface of my straight, expressionless face and half-lidded gaze, as the demons repeated in my head, “You’re nothing, Sam. Nothing.”

A lack of immediately available music that represented my mood brought with it a willingness to broaden my tastes. Luckily I had a friend who embraced what Mormon culture considered a path to purgatory. In addition to introducing me to butt rock, Daniel also introduced me to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Ozzy-style metal, Tetris, Kool-Aid, frozen burritos, and the forbidden HBO. I remember several occasions of snuggling with his basset hound, aptly named “Hound Dog,” and mimicking the southern accent of Cool Hand Luke’s warden as he said the words “What we have here is a failure to communicate….” from Guns N’ Roses’ “Civil War” while Daniel staved off boredom with Final Fantasy IV.

With new music came new perspectives. And “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm,” by the Crash Test Dummies, provided a new view of the crap-themed lives of so many of my high school peers. The droning “mmm”s and “ahhh”s in the song reminded me of how we all shuffled our way through the pain, our eyes fixed on the “now” while trying to, paradoxically, seek solace in sharing our shame with one another.

Embracing the spirit of new perspectives, I eventually gained a foothold in the realm of infatuation. Shortly after receiving my first kiss from my first girlfriend and between shifting from third to fourth gear in my Nissan Stanza, I clicked the next button on my in-dash CD player until I arrived at “Walking on the Moon,” by The Police. My heart was threatening to thump its way out of my rib cage as I belted the words to the song along with Sting (falsetto and all). I had never felt so free of self-doubt, such euphoria, and, yes, weightless.

My affinity for Sting-style “obsession” music must have reflected some of my attitudes towards my relationship with Tiffany. She quickly became the source of my self-esteem and happiness, which pressure, I believe, sowed the seeds for her desire to let me go six months later.
Music also began to represent freedom for me. During the same time period when I was teaching myself how to play the guitar, I remember driving around shotgun in my best friend/cousin’s ’83 Honda Accord as we drove on the pocked and dusty roads below Molly’s Hill (that’s right…off-roading in an Accord), as we belted out the different harmonies of “Surf Wax America,” by Weezer. Danny and I had accepted our dorky selves for who we were, so singing our masculine hearts out came easy when “The Man” wasn’t around to judge our adherence its cultural norms.
As I continued to further expand my musical tastes, I encountered the sultry diction of Dido. I distinctly remember listening to “Honestly OK” while sitting in my ’90 Toyota Camry under the shade of a large maple somewhere in Baltimore, Maryland, while waiting for a call to go do a security system install. I silently mouthed and let her lyrics speak for me, “I’m so lonely I don’t even wanna be with myself anymore.” Somehow, listening to her soothing voice and the dynamic overlay of rhythms in the song made me feel less lonely.

Along with loneliness, one feeling that only music can match is that of driving the expanse between Ohio and Nebraska at night. Every time I hear Sun Kil Moon’s “Carry Me Ohio,” it takes me back the sadness one feels when leaving behind a time slot wasted on the fruitless pursuit of fast money. The repeating pattern in the song almost sounds like the cadence created by tires thumping seams in a concrete road at 80 miles per hour.

In search of yet more music, financial security, and spiritual maturity, I made my way to eastern Idaho after five years of college. While driving home to my one-man apartment one evening, I remember my jaw dropping as I pulled into the driveway while listening to The Shins’ “A Comet Appears” for the first time. I played it again and again, listening carefully to every word and not caring that I was contributing a few more hydrocarbons to the atmosphere.

The most poignant line in the song is the first one: “One hand on this wily comet, Take a drink just to give me some weight….” The images cast in my mind by this poem became my personal bard and story. At the time, a recent failed relationship, a chronic pain problem, and various other despair-inducing situations had me questioning God’s motives and his supposed loving relationship with me. I felt unanchored in space, without direction and hope of escape. The only solace implied in the song was to expect eventual numbness to the pain.

And this song’s offering was enough to tide me over until I was no longer “Lost to the light and the loving we need.”