The Soundtrack of My Life

I have a thing for music.  I love to play music, but more than anything, I love listening to music.  I remember the first cassette I ever bought (Cyndi Lauper's "She's So Unusual").  I remember the first CD I ever bought (The Star Wars Original Motion Picture Trilogy Soundtrack).  I loved making mix tapes and mix CDs and I was thrilled to finally get an iPod which meant I could just go crazy making mixes.  I have a mix for everything under the sun - Bay to Breakers, the Oakland Marathon, Birth Mixes (laboring and pushing), dinner parties, bachelorette parties, a wedding party, hanging out with friends, and most recently, a mix specifically for doing squats and crunches (all about fire and burn and hard and endless....).  

What I most love about music is that it is so unifying.  You can be at a concert, in a bar, at a sporting event and a certain song comes on.  Everyone slowly starts bobbing their heads, pumping their fists, and singing along.  For that moment in time, everyone is unified in their love for that song, in exactly the same place and time.  The perfect song can make a permanent wallflower into a dancer.  He hears the strains of it and immediately must rush the dance floor to join in with everyone else who is just loving the song, loving the feeling.  Some stranger catches your eye and you are both so excited to see someone else bobbing their head to the same beat and loving that song just as much as you do. The energy of that song is just an amazing rush.

What I also love about music is that hearing a particular song can immediately transport me back into a memory, a feeling, a place, or a time.  I have been thinking about how to record these memories associated with songs for the longest time and I think I have finally come up with a way.  I still haven't decided on a rhyme or reason to it.  I am simply going to start with a song at random and go from there.  My memories might be foggy at times and I might misremember some of the very specific details. I might even get it completely wrong.  If you remember it differently, I would love to hear your memory!! 

Without further ado.... take a listen to the Soundtrack of my Life!