the year was 2004
The year was something like 2004. I was in the backseat of my mom’s red Honda Civic, looking out the window onto the endless Houston highway whirring past me. I looked for license plates from other states to cross off my list. It was Saturday morning, and so I was on my way to Chinese school of course. The sun pierced through the windows, waging war with the A/C on blast and I was likely wearing one of my mom’s sunglasses, which were oversized on me. They probably looked something like this:
Other than the hum of the highway and the vicious sun, the third thing etched forever in my memory is the radio. My mom would toggle between a handful of stations, but there was one station that was hands-down the coolest: 94.5 The Buzz. Houston’s premier alternative rock station.
94.5 introduced to me Nirvana, 30 Seconds To Mars, Soundgarden, The Smashing Pumpkins, Alice in Chains and the like. They were so angry and angsty and so was I. I loathed going to Chinese school.
Then on Sunday, we would stay home and listen to classical music. We had a Sharp 3-disc shelf stereo, seen below. Yo-Yo Ma would play, followed by maybe Charlotte Church’s Voice of Angel, and then Andrea Bocelli.
It probably wasn’t until a couple years after 2004 that I discovered Myspace and Youtube and began exploring music on my own. And the rest is history. . . history that would soon become extremely relevant this past weekend.
I hadn’t reflected much on my musical beginnings in a long time until recently, when three friends and I did something called a “7 Song Salon” (shout-out to Lily for organizing <3). This activity was first described in Priya Parker’s NYT podcast Together Apart (ep. How is This Night Different Than All Other Nights).
You invite a group of people — it could be family, it could be friends — and what they’re committing to is to listen to everybody else’s musical autobiography and to share their own.
Each person gets one salon. So whether it’s 60 minutes or 90 minutes over Zoom. You could invite people to do it over dinner. Bring your own dish. And the person needs to prepare ahead of time and bring the seven songs that most shaped you over the course of your life.
From the earliest memories to the present day. These could be songs that at some moment you may have listened to on repeat. It could be songs that bring you back to a very specific moment in time. It could be a formative song. It can be painful. It can be beautiful. It can be anything.
And this is what I mean by powerful structure. That when you have a legitimate need everybody else agrees on — so in this case, wanting to meaningfully connect with other people in a different way. Structure can actually give us a sense of focus and form to make order out of the chaos. To figure out how do we actually do this together.
What made this exercise valuable wasn’t that I learned that some of my friends were total Warped Tour punk rockers in their tender pre-teen years and that that led to a short-lived but now humorous foray into skateboarding, although that’s also a precious history to learn about, but hearing someone narrate important moments of their past is immensely fascinating. We all know each other as adults, but our pasts have a lot to do with where we are today; our tendencies, preferences, and beliefs in this moment. It’s never just about the song itself. There’s always more to dig into.
It’s important to remember that the exercise is to select seven songs that have most shaped you over the course of your life, not your favorite seven songs, although it’s not mutually exclusive. In some cases, we found that a surprising percentage of our playlists were songs we don’t regularly listen to anymore.
Another layer of this exercise is mapping out what songs set the foundation for other songs. Certain artists were *pivotal* in the evolution of my music taste and made way for eventually developing a liking for another very different artist. The witty lyricism of anti-folk artist Emmy the Great paved the path for falling in love with other clever storytellers like Courtney Barnett and Father John Misty. Maybe the reason why I was drawn to the emotional and dramatic orchestral sounds of Arcade Fire was because of Vivaldi. And then that in turn made way for the dark, climactic creations of Bodzin. Maybe? Maybe not? It’s interesting attempting to thread it all together.
This was such a fun and valuable activity in so many regards, and if you’ve read this far, I hope I’ve convinced you to try this out for yourself. Get a small group together, set aside an evening and see what happens. I’d love hear how it goes and what you uncover.
My seven, as of April/May 2020:
Gloria in D Major, RV 589 by Vivaldi
Tonight, Tonight by The Smashing Pumpkins
Canopies and Drapes by Emmy the Great
Something Good by alt-J
Always This Late by ODESZA
California by Delta Spirit
Kerberos by Stephan Bodzin
Happy digging,
Angela
All featured songs from this year in this playlist:
Looking for last year’s playlist? (they’ve moved)