The Music In Me

What is it about the intoxicating mix of music and memories?  I heard a song from my teen years yesterday morning, and it got me thinking about what it was like to be fourteen, and I started thinking a little bit about something I read once in the book This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin.  Now, I didn't agree with everything Levitin said in his collection of thoughts on brain development and how it interacts with our musical intelligence, but his chapter on teenage brain and musical imprinting did strike a chord (oh, yeah, I just made that terrible pun on purpose - sue me).  In his book, Levitin suggests that the music we listen to at around the age of fifteen will forever hold the strongest emotional connection for us, and we'll feel more attached to that music than that which comes before or after, because of what is happening in our brains at that time.  Teenagers are at the height of limbic brain development and their reasoning is dialed down, as well as the ability to make logical decisions (hello, it's what the teen years are KNOWN for - wonky decisions).  I can completely believe this, and thus my unnatural affection for certain songs by The Cure, The Smiths, and, forgive me, but, Bryan Adams. 


My brain was on overdrive in the late 1980's and it was before CD's had really become the primary source of home music, and long, long before iTunes was even a thought.  Music was captured off albums, off the radio, and recorded on cassette tapes.  Favorite tapes got played until they snapped and less favored tapes were recorded over, and over, and over, until they were a patchwork collection of bits and pieces of song snippets and commercials, and long forgotten DJ's making jokes that are no longer relevant or even understood.  I walked the edge of listening to punk rock, alternative rock, pop from the radio, and early boy bands like New Edition. 


Music was the glue that held together all the other parts of my life, when I was a young teen, and today it still holds together my memories of those years.  All I have to do is hear Moody Blues' "In Your Wildest Dreams" and I'm sitting under the homemade bins holding records in Penguin Feather record shop, back in Maryland.  I can still hear that song and the way that my two best friends and I got a little thrill when that song came on the radio.  We'd never heard of Moody Blues before that summer, and they were suddenly our favorite new band that had actually been around since long before we were born.


It was the days of making mixed tapes.  We had tapes for everything.  Beach road trips required a special mix.  Carpooling to school in the morning required a different mix - something to wake us up and get our brains on the right track for six and a half hours of what we saw as minimum security imprisonment.  On my Walkman, I listened to secret mixed tapes, the ones containing the songs that reminded me of certain boys, or certain specific memories I didn't want to share with anyone else.  My mother was convinced that I would go deaf from always having those foam headphones pressed to my ears, but it didn't matter, because wearing those headphones, with my music cranked up and the ability at any moment to fast forward or remind, I had a little bit of escape that I could take with me anywhere.  In 1987, the year I turned fifteen, my mix tape was a weird little eclectic mix of songs off the radio and tidbits gathered from my brother's collection of LP's.  It was the year I had also discovered used record stores existed, and I'd bolstered my knowledge of the classics with albums by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Herman's Hermits.  Yeah.  Don't ask about the last one.   "Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter" always made me smile. I think I liked the clearly British accent.


Summer 1987 favorite mix tape:


A Side


1. I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me) - Whitney Houston
2. Everybody Have Fun Tonight - Wang Chung
3. Let's Spend the Night Together - Rolling Stones
4. Touch Me, I Want Your Body - Samantha Foxx
5. Nasty - Janet Jackson
6. Back in the USSR - the Beatles
7. Kyrie - Mr. Mister
8. I Know You're Out There Somewhere - Moody Blues


B Side


1. Crazy For You - Madonna
2. I Melt With You - Modern English
3. Kiss- Prince
4. Farewell My Summer Love - Michael Jackson
5. She Loves You - the Beatles
6. Living on a Prayer - Bon Jovi
7. In Your Wildest Dreams - Moody Blues




Clearly, I had some kind of crush working that summer.  Or maybe it was when I was dating one of the temporary boyfriends I had at that age, the kind that made me write my name next to theirs and doodle little hearts around our initials on my notebooks.  One has to wonder about the random inclusion of "Back in the USSR" and "Living on a Prayer," and what those might have said about that summer.  The details are long gone from my memory, but the emotions remain.  The tape disintegrated years ago, but I can still hear it in my mind, including the annoying way that the first side cut off about ten seconds before the song actually ends.  Whoever owned the car you were in, you knew there was going to be a collective groan when a favorite song cut off mid note.


A few years back, a friend and coworker introduced me to the writing of Rob Sheffield, who is a well respected writer for Rolling Stone magazine.  He grew up just a few years before I did, and all his connections to music felt familiar and cozy to me, but it was his book Love is a Mix Tape that made a whole different kind of imprint on me. In this book, much like in his other two books, Sheffield connects music to emotion and uses lists of songs to drag the reader into his own memories.  But it's about more than that; it's a story of a kind of love that boggles the mind, and when I read it that first time, I fell a little in love with his wife, Renee, myself.  In the story, set against a backdrop of basement punk rock and drunken nights of shouting out lyrics to one-hit wonders, he made me envy his short lived marriage to this described force of nature.  I was jealous of Sheffield for having that kind of love with anyone, and my heart broke with his when I read of Renee's sudden death.  In my head, when I hear the songs he attributes to different stages of their relationship, I can feel a subtle manipulation of my emotions as well.


So I was heartbroken for Sheffield, and there was elation about a year later, when I discovered he had a new book coming out.  Turn Around Bright Eyes documents a new chapter in his life, exploring his relationship with his second wife, Ally, through their mutual love of karaoke.  Cheesy classics and 1990's alternative rock are the foundation for the story of his return to being a husband and to feeling something outside of nostalgia and grief.  Sheffield lays himself out naked for the world, in exposing his grief and the strange depths to which he sank, before starting to live again.  But my favorite parts of this story were in how his second major relationship compared to the first.  Renee was his young love, his burst of excitement and raw sex and driving too fast to music played too loud.  Ally was the woman he found later, a more comfortable kind of love, no less real, just not dialed up to eleven.  There's an a-ha moment in his storytelling when he describes both of them sitting in her living room while he was reading, and her telling him that, if he just wasn't too busy, she'd really like more of his attention and affection right then.  And he realized, "oh, this is how grown ups have a relationship."  Oh, yeah?  I hope I get to find that out someday, too, Rob.


Even without a physical soundtrack attached to his writing, I heard the echoes of those songs in my head, and made that connection with the writer.  As much as I ached for him in Mix Tape, I felt his confusion and elation in Bright Eyes.  Sheffield managed to bring together a powerful storyteller in himself, with the powerful drug of music.  It is a drug - it changes brain chemistry, forges neurological connections, and at times can make us irrationally emotional.


I still make playlists on my computer - the one playing right now is titled "Shut Up and Get Shit Done."  It's a fun mix of Billy Joel, The Smiths, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Leon Bridges, Neko Case, A Fine Frenzy, Kate Bush, and John Coltrane.  All of the songs on it have meaning to me, but nothing too deep that might pull me away from my work.  It's all about balance when you're talking about music.  Or really, about anything in life, I suppose. 


Playlists are fun, but sometimes I miss the hiss and pop of a really good mix tape.  The thrill of someone else making a tape for you, picking out songs that make them think of you.  Nothing like popping a tape into the deck with some anticipation, and wondering what you're going to hear.  Sometimes you're elated because it's a song with some deep meaning and other times, you're bound for disappointment, when it's nothing but techno pop without soul.  It's always worth the ride.


I'm a little sad now to think that the music my children are going to forever connect to might come from Justin Bieber, One Direction, or Ke$ha.  But they've been raised in my house, and maybe some classics might slip in there somewhere, somehow.  Still, I wonder what's pounding into their brains, what's imprinting on them, through those tiny little ear buds that have long since replaced the foam covered headphones I grew up treasuring.  What music will make their hearts pound, or ache from remembered unrequited crushes, what tunes will make their hearts race, or make them laugh remembering a best friend years from now?