The Maryland public school system requires that high school students do a project each year involving the use of various literary vocabulary words and MLA citations. My AP English Lit teacher liked to bend the rules. During our senior year, to satisfy this requirement, she assigned to each of us the task of creating a fifteen-song soundtrack to our lives, songs that characterized our progression through early childhood, elementary, middle, and high school. For each song, we'd write a paragraph justifying its presence while including some vocabulary word, and then we'd do the MLA citation for it at the end.
As a highly introspective person, I enjoyed the project and got a lot out of it. Every memorable period in my life has had some piece of music associated with it, and I found it very hard to limit myself to just fifteen. Reading over my commentary now, I'm slightly embarrassed at the overly maudlin quality, which I'd like to attribute to the need to fill space. The songs themselves, though, are exactly the ones I would have picked again, given the opportunity. I'm listing them out here with the TL;DR just below.
1995:
Bonne Nuit (Brahms' Lullaby)
- Lullabies my mom would sing to me every night.
1996:
- I liked little kid songs that pretended to be techno.
2001:
Musical Times Tables
- I was the multiplication tables champion, and that was all that was important to me as a third grader. (Not like my parents' divorce a year prior was a big deal or anything...)
- I just liked the way this one sounded, but my mom would always tear up and hug me when this one came on. I didn't appreciate why until later.
2002:
- This was another lullaby my mom would sing to me, but there was a section that always ripped me up.
"But I can sing this song // And you can sing this song when I'm gone. // It won't be long before another day. // We're gonna have a good time. // And no one's gonna take that time away. // You can stay as long as you like."
It took a while for reality to settle in with respect to my parents' divorce, and things were pretty ugly. My mom had remarried and was pregnant with my baby brother, my father forbade references to our stepdad as "Dad" around him, and my grandfather was dying of cancer. Lullabies were supposed to promise peace and safety, but this one talked about disappearing and lost time. I wanted certainty and got none. 2002 was a sad year.
2003:
- Adventures in orchestra and the beginnings of teacher crushes. Orchestra remained the driving motivator in my life from that year on.
2004:
- More adventures in orchestra, with a Celtic twist. I had just started playing fiddle. ("Star of the County Down" and "The Rakes of Kildare" are okay, but "Gravelwalk" is a LOT faster than what is played here.)
2005:
- I found Evanescence as a sad seventh grader with no self-esteem thanks to my father and the guy I competed with in all aspects of life. There was nothing I could do to please the former; any mistake I made was a public embarrassment to him .The latter, though, was an insecure little boy who helped himself up by bringing me down. I recognized that and pitied him for it, but it didn't make the taunting or the insults hurt any less.
- More Evanescence. Five years after the divorce and things weren't much better. Then I started learning the details of why things fell apart.
2006:
- Spritual explorations led to me rejecting everything and slowly accepting only those things that I needed. I didn't come around full-circle, but I did become convinced that confirmation was the right step. Still living in doubt, but I'm in a place where that's okay.
- A breath of fresh air from all the angst, à la Europop.
2007:
What the Devil Ails You!/Loch Ness
- This is my favorite fiddle set, and I'd been playing it for four years by that point. I started getting involved in our local Celtic group, and my sound improved hugely at that point. If you'd like to hear it, I'd be happy to play it for you.
2008:
- Suzuki Vol. 6, the first song in the book. Corelli's adaptation for violin of one of the oldest known chord sequences, in D minor. This was my song for the year and no one else's. I knew that I had peaked there, and it made me kind of sad. That's the choice you make when you decide not to be a career musician, though.
2009:
- Things finally started settling down and have been getting better since.
"Wake up in the morning. // I will wake up and so shall you. // And I'll wake up. The sun is beautiful. // And it is warming you and I, fragile as we lie."
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