My father used to play guitar and my mom sang in our church choir while I was growing up, so I was always around music in some way or another. However I didn’t really dig my heels in until I was 11 years old and heard a Blink-182 song. My life has been one huge musical ever since, a new song/album/soundtrack at every turn. Here’s the soundtrack of my life from ages 11-23. It’s crazy that music has directed so much of what I’ve done or been there in such a way that my specific memories line up with different songs.
Little Things // Good Charlotte
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4oCDAXQC34&w=740&h=422]
Oh man, this makes me feel a little guilty. But it’s how I got into music! I was 10 or 11 years old and living in a foreign country due to my father’s line of work when someone told me what “punk rock” was. This, to a 10 year old, didn’t mean The Sex Pistols or the Clash or even Rancid – it mostly meant bands like Blink-182 or Good Charlotte. This was the popular music at the time, and I was not popular. I was little, quiet, and I looked like a bad mix of Harry Potter and Ron Weasley with a little bit of an overbite.
Anyhow, someone told me to listen to Good Charlotte so I went home and pirated a bunch of songs by them off of a now-defunct file sharing site (I didn’t know what pirating was or that it was illegal at this age, either). At first I hated it. But the intro for the song Little Things kicked in with “this is for all the kids who got picked last in gym class,” and I instantly felt like I could relate. It was mind blowing that this band was liked by those deemed “popular” or “cool” and they were so open about being unpopular and mistreated by those people who were labeled the same way. It was the most accessible band for me to fall into a genre I’ve called home ever since, and was also what made me fall in love with music as a whole.