My life in music

So far, you've seen my life to some extent chronicled in food and even more so in fashion.  But as I was cooking dinner with my ipod blaring in the background, I thought of how each song vividly recalls different times in my life.

Duran Duran Rio

Duran Duran's Rio still to this day is one of my very favorites.  Duran Duran was the first concert I ever attended.  It was at the Meadowlands in NJ and I was in the seventh grade.

Thompson Twins Here's to Future Days

Fast forward a couple of years.  My family had moved from NJ to FL and I was a sophomore in high school.  I was new and at lunch sitting in the cafeteria all by my lonesome but happily oblivious with my headphones on.  I had this bright red Sony walkman and I was listening to the Thompson Twins cassette (can you imagine a life without online music and Ipods?) when the principal came over and confiscated my walkman.  Apparently one was not allowed to listen to music at lunch.  Who knew?!

New Order Substance

1988, I had finished high school and had moved to Gainesville FL for college.  I can still picture my dorm room and my boombox which was constantly playing New Order's Substance.

Aimee Mann I'm With Stupid

1996 I moved to Boston for graduate school.  I remember in great detail sitting in the apartment that I shared with my brother on Saint Botolph St, with my very large accounting textbook in front of me on the dining table. I was simultaneously studying and crying because school was really, really difficult and my brother found my duress endlessly amusing (in fact, he still does, but that's what little brothers are for, right?).  I always studied to music and the constant rotation was between Aimee Mann's I'm With Stupid and the Sundays' Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.

The Sundays Reading, Writing, Arithmetic

The irony of the titles of these albums only is just now hitting me. 

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly The Chronicles of a Bohemian Teenager

On one of my annual Nantucket trips with my girlfriends, we had a late boozy night at Lola and we loved the music they were playing.  We had never heard it before and the guy in charge of the music there told me it was some group called Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.  We joked and called the band Buy a Cape, Put it on, Go out.  But I bought the album and each time I listen to it I think of my girlfriends and our annual jaunts to Nantucket.

So here's the thing about music; for me, certain songs, albums, lyrics will always bring me to specific moments in time in my life. And these are a few that I listened to then and in some cases decades later still listen to and enjoy as much for the music as for the memories.