Are you able to associate certain times in your life with certain songs, or just an artist in general? As I was reminiscing the other day, I started thinking about first starting High School. Stone Temple Pilots dominated my CD player at the time, so when I hear certain songs by Stone Temple Pilots, I’ll think about when I stepped off the bus for the first time for High School.
Each year of High School I had a couple of bands that I listened to a lot. 9th grade had a lot of Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden. 10th grade featured a lot of Pearl Jam, Replacements, and Nirvana. 11th grade had Faith No More, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Barenaked Ladies. 12th grade was a mish mash of things. A lot of it had to do with my girlfriend that I had during all of my senior year. She got me into Radiohead and now I associate pretty much all of their songs with her. This was also the same time I got into Eels, Orchestral Maneuvers In the Dark a lot, and The Beta Band. Like with Stone Temple Pilots, a lot of these songs bring me back a couple of years to High School.
I’m able to remember when/where I was the first time I listened to songs or an artist for the first time. I was cleaning the gutters of my house during 2005’s hurricane seasons when I first heard Smashing Pumpkin’s “Bullet With Butterfly Wings”. I remember the first time I heard Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” I was in my dad’s truck waiting for him to pump gas. I’m not sure if this is just some acute memory thing I’ve got going with myself, or if somehow these artist have impacted me in some way.
Soundgarden became an instant hit with me since I first discovered them in my dad’s CD collection. I’ll always attribute them to being the group that brought me into a more mature musical world, one that wasn’t dominated by Linkin Park and Blink 182.
Can you do the same? Are you able to connect certain songs or artist to events in your life? These connections can be happy or sad. Connecting Japanese/American band Crush 40 and their power anthems to graduation day would be a good thing. However, having Radiohead bring back memories of your first serious failed relationship will be a bad thing.
P.S Song of the week is “The Happy Song” by The Aliens and check out the video at the bottom of this article. It’s a great song made by an associated band with that of the previous week’s video The Beta Band. Really awesome video, and I don’t see why it’s getting such poor ratings on YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YikDJIj9Mo&feature=fvw
(Embedding was disabled by YouTube, unfortunately, sorry.)
This issue's "Musical Musings" is ©2009 by Robert Tyler. All graphics this page, except where otherwise noted, are creations of Nolan B. Canova. All contents of Nolan's Pop Culture Review are ©2009 by Nolan B. Canova.
