So earlier this week I had a bit of a “crisis.” My headphones broke! I needed to get replacements, else my cleaning job would actually feel like–gasp–a cleaning job. It was short notice when it happened, so I had to settle for a pretty cheap replacement pair until I could get something that sounded a little less tinny. Still, it was better than nothing.

Sweeping the floors and having my iPod shuffle around songs is always an interesting experience. The act can become movingly epic or creepy or bubbly depending on what’s playing in the background. Fun. It’s also interesting how much of sound is tied to memory. How sometimes something will come on and it’ll just take you back. I can’t listen to No Doubt’s Don’t Speak without being transported to 6th grade, to the school gym, to one of my very first dances with a boy and how weird it was and how much I wanted it to be over. The Goo Goo Dolls’s Iris was the Father/Daughter, Mother/Son dance at my 8th grade graduation and NO, I don’t want to know what the DJ was thinking when he decided to play it, though I do remember wondering about it at the time. Everyone did. At least I hope they did because ?

(8th Grade Grad was completely lame by the way and my shoes hurt my feet and NOBODY danced and I left early because I was a rebel like that. 8th Grade Grad was also the closest to Prom I ever got. I am happy to report it was close enough to satisfy me.)

Chris de Burgh’s Into the Light is the reason I love music. I will defend The Lady in Red for the rest of my life for that alone. I was about five when I first heard it and it was then I realized that songs could be stories, wow. It was me at five with the headphones on, ignoring the company we had, sitting next to the CD player, reading the liner notes as the songs played and I couldn’t believe I could be in a room with people and be in an entirely different world at the exact same time. Wow.

American Pie is the drive through the backroads on the way home from the city with my sister in those summer months after she got her driver’s license. She’d pop the tape in at a certain point and without fail, perfectly timed, the song would end as soon as we pulled up to the house. I loved being in the passenger’s side when she was driving… most of the time.

Moxy Fruvous’s Bargainville is always summer to me and 1994 and the first case of my sister’s musical taste influencing mine. In the 4th grade, I brought Bargainville to school and played River Valley on Earth Day.

Needless to say, nobody appreciated it.

Phenomenon was the first soundtrack I ever bought. On tape, no less. I bought if for Eric Clapton’s Change the World and made my poor grandparents listen to it over and over and over again on the ride home from the city. Which was no small feat since my grandmother had to stop the tape and rewind it every single time. She didn’t complain once.

Eva Cassidy helped me through one of my first griefs, when I was 17.

I raked the leaves to a taped copy of The Great Expectations soundtrack playing on one of our old, silver walkmen. That is not really important enough to warrant remembering, but it’s something I’ve never been able to forget, just because I was doing that while it played and I was happy to do it while it was playing. And now, years later, I always like to revisit that soundtrack in the fall.

My high school had a habit of playing It’s My Life over the PA before first bell. That could be part of the reason I dropped out.

Roy Orbison was like The Second Coming of music for me, and that only happened within the last two years.

Anyway, I don’t know what the point of this entry is beyond telling you that I love music.

And I think I know what I’m calling Your Mom! But that’s all I’ll say about that for now.

So what about ye lot? I’m very curious. Gots any notes on music, songs that take you back to a particular moment in your life? Remember the first album you bought? Share!

(I know, I know. This entry was severely lacking in the lulz.)