Studying Music

Rewind to first year of high school. I was fresh from homeschool plunging headfirst into the shock of a culture I’d lived fourteen years only looking at from a very far distance. Mom was always strict with our lifestyles, so the clothing, pop culture references, and conversation topics of the average teen were strangers to me.

I thought the only thing I’d be studying in school included math equations, historical timelines, vocabulary and poetry. I was wrong.

I studied music with avid enthusiasm. I started out just hoping to identify the major songs of whoever everyone else was talking about at the time. The girls whom I became close with in my grade were listening to Destiny’s Child, the Backstreet Boys, Christina Aquilera and Nelly Furtado. There were other boy bands and women whose names all blended together for a while, but I started to figure it out and slowly found my own place in it all.

My mom hated Britney Speares, and how I adored her. Britney was fierce, confident, so unapologetically out there and herself: everything I deep down felt and knew I wasn’t. So listening to songs like “Gimme More” and “…Baby One More Time” loosened something in me and made me feel a way I didn’t feel at home where I was the quiet, smart one. And then she’d come around with “Everytime” and teach me emotions I hadn’t even thought belonged to me. Britney taught me to release another part of me I hadn’t engaged in years, to dance like I didn’t care, and to embrace the strange magic of lip syncing and moving to the rhythm. She held my hand on the first step to embracing me.

Britney wasn’t my only lady love of the time. One Christmas, I think in my freshman year, my brother bought me one of those portable CD players for Christmas. I didn’t own any CDs at the time, but my older sister had Kelly Clarkson’s Breakaway album. I didn’t know much about Kelly before this other than that her song “Walk Away” was fierce and had an awesome music video. I swiped the CD and spent a whole day in my room listening to the album on repeat and experiencing that teen sensation that my life was drastically changing with every verse that came out of Kelly’s mouth and into the padded receivers over my ears. Her songs took me vivid places in my mind outside the blue walls of the bedroom I shared with my sister. “Since You Been Gone” and “Gone” taught me how to get over a stupid boy before I’d even dated a stupid boy. “Breakaway” exported me to a life beyond the lame one I sometimes I felt I had. I imagined myself going from staring out my own window to really doing and being something.

I got into the habit of creating/directing music videos in my head to my favorite songs. I fancied myself pretty good at it too. My favorite was Nickelback’s “Savin’ Me”. Yes, I was one of the lovers amidst their haters, and I will never understand their argument. Chad Kroeger’s voice will never bore me, and he looks like Jesus with a bad hair coloring. I was obsessed. In my mind video of “Savin’ Me” there was this firefighter stuck in the room of a building on fire having flashbacks of his relationship with a woman that he doesn’t want to lose. There’s some slow motion, he finds a kid, he gets out heroically running through flames as the building collapses. Certain lines really stuck out to me: “come please, I’m calling … I’m falling.” I think I felt that message deeply at the time, though I lacked the vocabulary or awareness to say anything to others or myself.

The other man voice in my life was Adam Levine’s. Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved” brought me nearly to tears sometimes. I had this innocent vision of Timmy, my crush at the time, showing up outside my window (of course none of my siblings or parents were present to disturb the romance) in the rain and calling for me. Oh Timmy, my door’s always open.

Once I got my ipod (a red nano bought with savings from my job at the pizza shop), my horizons became limitless. Jay-Z and Eminem showed up to feed my insecurities and fuel my runs. The Fray and the Weepies (introduced to me by my closest friend) guided me deeper into the well of my emotions and perceptions of others’ emotions. Most of the music I listened to in those teen years was brought to my ears as a gift from the friends in my life. I took what they gave me and listened to what spoke to me.

And soon I was no longer studying artist names and song titles. I was listening, feeling, imagining. I lived lives apart from my own in those songs. I guess music was an escape in some ways, but it was also a discovery, a journey in myself in a way.