A musical meme: 20 of…

I really enjoyed reading @hush & @Anandi‘s list of 20 Albums that changed their life so I thought I’d compile my own list.  However, once I started thinking about it – I realised I’ve been more profoundly affected by individual songs than unified albums.   There are so many moments and memories in my life that are linked directly to particular songs that I decided to take liberties with the meme and change it to 20 songs that marked my life.

The songs are in no particular order.  I’ve provided links to Youtube videos of some (but not all) of the songs.

1.  Anchor Me: The Mutton Birds

This was not my “wedding song” – y’know, the official one for our first dance at the reception that we spent ages choosing – but it is my wedding song.  We just had an ipod and speakers for a sound system for music at our wedding reception and one of my husband’s cousins playlisted this song.  I had sort of heard it before but had never really registered it as a romantic song.  I mean, really, it starts with a line about songs sung from deadmen’s tongues.  When it came on though, I was half tanked and having a great night with so many people I loved in the room. It totally captured my deep sense of love for my husband in that moment.  Every time I hear it, I’m back on the dance floor with my husband, surrounded by friends and family all singing along to the chorus.  (Well, the New Zealanders would have been singing along.  I’m not sure as many of the Australians knew the song.)

Oh and in case you were wondering, our  official wedding song for the ‘first dance’ was So True, by the Black Seeds.  It’s got a lovely “summer holiday in NZ” video.  The video was shot in the Coromandel and features Cathedral Cove, which is one of about four places I’ve been warm enough to swim in the ocean off NZ.  The Cove is only accessible by foot or boat and is surrounded by high white cliffs that create a really lovely, warm microclimate.

2. Don’t Fight It: The Panics

This song always reminds me of the last months of my pregnancy with Moo – the lyrics and music really spoke to my heart. It was partly about psyching myself up for giving birth, partly controlling the fear I felt for the health of my baby and partly about giving in to the truth of my life changing irrevocably.

(If you look at video, I don’t really understand it.  The band is from Perth – so I have no idea what the random historic US shots are about – St Louis?!?)

3. Bad Medicine: Bon Jovi

The American Club Kuala Lumpur, Halloween Party, Middle School  It was the 80′s.  It was fun.  There was a fright house, junk food and some crazy kid-style dancing.  ’Nuff said.

4. Here Comes Your Man:  The Pixies

I think I taped this off the wonderful Triple J radio station, because I clearly remember listening to it on my walkman in a minivan on a family road trip to Western Australia’s southwest forest region when I was about 13 or 14.  It’s no longer my favourite Pixies song – and god knows, I’m no longer in Triple J’s core youth demographic – but my teenage years & early 20′s would have been infinitely poorer without the Pixies and the J’s.

5. Henry Rollins, Spoken Word – not sure what performance but I heard it c1993

A train ride from Alexandria to Cairo in Eygpt.  I was in 11th grade and had been at an inter-school Academic Games competition.  I’d met a very intense Pakistani-German guy who was living in Abu Dhabi.  He was to become my first ‘long-distance’ relationship/love.  He lent me a tape with Henry Rollins doing spoken word to listen to on the train – I no longer remember the details but I remember the INTENSITY of it.  I’ve never really gotten into Black Flag or any more of Rollins’ music, but just hearing his name takes me back to that train cabin, with red velour seats and wooden framed windows, looking out over rural Egypt…  Actually, this guy deserves a lot of credit.  He sent me Nirvana albums and insisted I listen to them (even after I insisted they were too boy-rock for me).  Yeah.  He was right.  They were worth listening too.

6. Straight Lines: Silverchair

This song marks some moments of profound grief for me.  A colleague and friend died from an infection acquired while he was having chemotherapy for leukaemia.  I’d visited him in hospital a few days previously and had a good, high spirited conversation full of nothing.  I was not happy in my job – we used to have lots of conversations about all the other things we could be doing rather than working for the man.  When he died it was such a shock that it made me re-think the inertia that was keeping me in a well paid job that was making me very unhappy.  A few days after he died, I was back at work and I’d had to walk out mid-morning because I was about to fall apart.  I walked down to a nearby outlet mall to get a coffee and a little retail therapy and this song was playing over the sound system.   It was loud, it was intense and I was in a concrete space, outside a chain store coffee shop.  I just felt desolate.

For all that, it is actually a fairly positive song about keeping moving through pain. I listen to this song now, especially after my series of miscarriages, to remind myself there is strength in grief and that it is possible to wake up strong in the morning.  I still cry pretty much every time I listen to it though.

7. Birdhouse in Your Soul: They Might Be Giants

Switzerland, a Johns Hopkins summer camp, August 1990 and the start of the Gulf War.  What I didn’t know was that friends of our family had been taken hostage off the BA flight that landed in Kuwait just after the invasion.  My parents chose not to tell me until I got home to K.L.  They were a family of four – parents, a five year old and a toddler.  It does make me two degrees of separation from Saddam Hussein (or at least, a Saddam Hussein look-alike) as the father met ‘Saddam’ in an interview shown on CNN.

And then, 21 years later, dancing around the kitchen with my baby, me singing my head off – her laughing her head off.  I have to admit, I was so happy to discover They Might Be Giants do kids music now.  I *choose* to listen to that in the car.  I’m not sure my husband loves E eats Everything as much as I do though…

8. Apartment: Custard

First year university, being obnoxious in the residential hall by synchronising CD players with a friend at the other end of the hallway to play this song. “Ears Sing to Me!!!”

9. Heavenly Pop Hit: The Chills

I played this song over and over and over on my (now) husbands stereo in the bedroom of our first Auckland share-house.  Our bedroom had white 70s shag carpet and I had to stand on the bed to get dressed without getting fluff all over my black work pants… I don’t think I’d heard of the Chills before I moved to New Zealand.  I did get to see a version of the band before we left Auckland and it was a really good show.

10. Karma Karma Chameleon: Boy George

The school bus, early elementary school! Our school bus was K to 12, and the high schoolers always played their music on the stereo.  Our bus ride was 30 to 45 minutes – so there was plenty of time for music.  I heard a lot of different music… from Boy George to the Beastie Boys…

11. Jackson: Johnny Cash & June Carter

My husband and I would sing this song as a duet in the car when Moo was tiny.  For a little while, it seemed to stop her crying while we were in the car.  Then it didn’t any more.  So we stopped singing it.

12. Jesus I was Evil: Darcy Clay

This song is linked to my first real engineering job. It makes me think about busting out of the office by myself, driving my boss’s car, heading to the beach somewhere in Auckland for a site visit.  Our musical taste actually aligned pretty well despite the fact that he was 15 or so years older than me.  The CDs he kept in his car introduced me to a range of Kiwi music I had never heard before.

13. Why Does Love Do this To Me?: The Exponents

Another Kiwi song, it’s been played (and sung along to) at every rugby game I’ve been to in New Zealand.  It was used in Air New Zealand’s Rugby World Cup promotional advertising. As hideously cliched as the rugby association is, I love the song. I love watching sport and I love the hyped up crowd atmosphere and I would love to go to the Wellington Seven’s for a sing along. So there.

14. Streets of your Town: The Go-Betweens

I had been watching Rage late one night, fell asleep and woke up to this song at about 2am.  The video was golden in the dark and I was in love with the song.  It took me a while to find out who sang it (it wasn’t exactly current) and even longer to get a copy.  But it stuck with me.  I completely agree with the commenter on the youtube video who says, “I think it’s also the best advert for using the now-extinct Kodachrome cine film. Nothing else looks like it, and nothing else can capture a mood like this.” 

15. Hoover Dam: Sugar

The album Copper Blue came out in 1992.    I know I bought it without listening to it just because I’d read about Bob Mould/Husker Du and I liked the album art work.  I used to do that a lot.  I lived in Kuwait – my access to “alternative” music was pretty limited.  This song was my senior year of high school (1994/5) -I’m tempted to claim my last couple of years of high school were tough socially – but then, whose weren’t? I was ’right on the center line, between two states of mind.’  - so ready to move on to university and a ‘normal’ social life (because y’know, I just don’t think a ‘party’ where a British Army explosives expert sets up a table of defused mines for all the kids to check out to help avoid getting themselves blown up is ‘normal’.)  I think I had a countdown going from my first day of senior year.

16. Oh My God: Kaiser Chiefs

Dancing in the mosh pit at Metro’s City with my brother and husband in 2007.  High energy!!

17. The Wide Open Road: The Triffids

This song holds such a sense of place for me – it is Western Australia and driving for hours through the same scenery – baked brown grass and khaki bush.  The music video is perfect in my eyes.  I couldn’t listen to it in New Zealand.

18. The Unguarded Moment: The Church

This song always reminds me of when one of my friends came out as a lesbian, when we were in our second year of university.  I wasn’t exactly surprised.

19. Kinky Afro: The Happy Mondays

This song reminds me of walking to the newsagents across the road from our house in Malaysia to buy the (several months out of date) NME when I was in 8th grade.  Oh, and trying to listen to John Peel on shortwave BBC.  The radio reception was mostly fuzz, so this was where I started on my ‘buy albums because I’d read about the band’ kick that lasted through much of my teen years.  Probably my biggest mistake was picking the Inspiral Carpets album over the Stone Roses ‘Fool’s Gold’.  God, I remember deliberating over that in the music shop for AGES – because I only had enough pocket money to buy one cassette.

20. Stop, Drop and Roll: Mareko feat. Deceptikonz

I started with one wedding song, and I’m finishing with another ‘wedding’ memory song.  Yes, this was one of the last songs played at our wedding reception.  There was literally a bit of stop, dropping and rolling on the dance floor courtesy of some of the madder members of my husband’s family.  It really was one hell of a party.