Songs from My Life (1)

A good friend in Peace Corps told me, “you can only write what you know” and “we write so that other people will know us better.”  We did a lot of writing during our 2 years in Paraguay, usually as a way to let friends and family back home know we were OK, sometimes just because we had a lot of free time, and sometimes as a form catharsis.  Another Peace Corps friend, Marcy, started writing short reflections focused around a particular song that was important at a particular point in her life.  I am completely stealing her format (although she did tell me I could) and will start periodically posting stories featuring songs that served as the background for many important parts of my life.

I always feel the need to ask myself whenever I post anything, “Why am I writing this and sending it to people?” or put in another way, “Why should people waste their time reading what I have to say?”  I guess like my friend said, I write so that people will know me better, as well as to entertain, and hopefully inspire you, the reader/listener, to do some reflecting of your own on the music in your life and share it with others.  Music is one of those almost universal things that humans do everywhere.  The music in our lives can tell us a lot about what kind of people we are.  I think it can also be a bit of common ground for us to relate to people who may seem different from us.  I would love to hear some of the songs from your life, what stories go along with them, and what they mean to you.  So with that long introduction, I’ll start with the first post in this series:

Green Day – “When I Come Around” from the album Dookie (1994) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmJxtgmsqAE

Music for me started with my older brother.  I suppose that’s probably how it starts for most of us with older siblings.  I remember when my brother bought his first CD player.  It was the coolest thing I had ever seen.  No more eaten cassette tapes, no more fast-forwarding and rewinding to songs that I used to record off of the radio.  Seriously, I used to record the local Top 40 station whenever I heard a song I liked come on.  Sometimes I would even just let it run and record an hour or so of the radio, commercials and everything.  And then I would listen to that recording over and over again.  Like most Top 40 stations, I probably could have just kept listening to the live feed and would have heard those same 6 songs every hour anyways, but there was something cool about those tapes and swapping favorite recording sessions with friends who were home doing the same thing.  But with that CD player, you could skip right to the beginning of any song on that shiny disc.  No more guess work on when to press Play.  Whoa.

One of the early CDs my brother had that I remember listening to over and over again was “Dookie” by Green Day.  It was cool, it was rebellious, and being a pre-teen, it let me feel like I had at least something in common with my cooler, older, teenaged brother.  I didn’t really understand most of lyrics on the album.  I didn’t know what a “user” was and certainly didn’t identify with that side of the music, but something about being an average, strait-edge, middle class white kid in small town USA made me wonder if being just that was really OK.  There was this big scary world out there, so messed up and dangerous and I really didn’t want any part of it, but at least through my brother’s CD player, I could feel like I understood a little bit about it.  I wasn’t a punk rocker, druggie, or in any way a rebel, but for some reason this song sticks.  Maybe Green Day was telling me something before the chorus: “You may find out that your self-doubt means nothing / You can’t go forcing something if it’s just not right.”