Snow means real life is paralyzed; the only way to spend a day pent up inside your house, because you can’t open your front door, is doing nothing at all. I watched Empire Records, and it was phenomenal. I’d forgotten how much I love AC/DC and Coyote Shivers, the flannel shirts and long greasy hair. Walking home across the tightly packed snow in the tire tracks of the cars that had tried to be productive all day long, a pop-ish, middle school Gin Blossoms song from the movie kept playing in my head. At that moment, the 20 second sound clip was perfect, matching the beat of my footsteps as they fell on the snow.
My thoughts have always rushed around in my head to the rhythms of different kinds of music. Sometimes I’ll hear a perfect song, usually when I’m driving somewhere with my windows open, walking around in the wind or sitting alone at my computer. If this song matches me closely enough it always makes me breathe a little differently—it resonates flawlessly, bouncing around my mind. The melody somehow flies along with my thoughts, whirls at the same pace, and softly massages whatever I feel at that second.
After years of music trends have saturated my mind, I have this abstract group of songs that would make up the soundtrack to my life. Never having written these songs down when they occur to me, I have no official list, but I remember most of them through the moments the songs match.
There’s the techno song I heard on the radio driving home from the first high school party I went to after coming back from college—I never found out what it was, but the beat is ingrained in my memory. This Pacific Northwest hippie-ish band I used to see in high school, Calobo, sings about five songs that rotate on my list every time the sun is shining. And when it’s dark and blustery outside, Dave Brubeck’s jazz hit “Take Five” plays in my head without any prompting whatsoever. Last semester I wrote in my journal incessantly, and my favorite songs to listen to were Sister Hazel’s guitar-heavy “Champagne High,” Chicane’s soothing “No Ordinary Morning” and Jeff Buckley’s ballad-y “Lover, You Should Have Come Over.” Even now, whenever I hear any of these songs my breath catches in my throat.
The soundtrack to my life mimics my thoughts themselves in their randomness. Everything from Northwest grunge to hippie rock to jazz to techno … This soundtrack would never sell in any sort of store, but I’d love it. I’d play it over and over again until the CD player was burning hot, sitting back and relishing the memories it flashed on the screen of my closed eyelids. My songs are so intensely personal, because they remind me of a part of myself I can’t easily access without their aid. In my opinion, everyone should try to create a soundtrack in their minds.
Try it. Sit back and put Winamp on random, skipping every song that doesn’t resonate quite perfectly enough. A song will come on and you’ll know it’s the one: it’s the song that reminds you of yourself to the point that it matches the very thought you are thinking at that instant. You’ll begin to see actions you haven’t yet committed played back to you in third person, in Technicolor or in black and white. In this filmed version of your life you’re everything you want to be—most glamorous dream of yourself. You are your most photogenic version. You’ll begin to tailor your actions to fit the most camera-worthy version of your life.
You begin to think of other songs that could match your life. Whether it’s Nick Drake or Pink Floyd or Counting Crows or Ella or Ozzy or Chopin, that song is able to traverse the innermost caverns of your mind, the places no one but you can go.
By the time the song ends, you’ll have gone on an oh-so-fantastic and beautifully enjoyable journey through your own mind, catalyzed by the chords you’ve heard. Whenever I hear songs like these, I spend the 5 minutes while the music plays clutching my own heart, epiphany after epiphany hitting me like ton after ton of bricks.
I’ll continue doing whatever it is I was doing before the song came on, whether it’s walking to my apartment through ridiculous snow drifts or driving to and from a high school party, letting my thoughts fly with the music but understanding that it’s the memories and feelings these songs conjure up that creates their magic. That’s why no one would even pick up “Julia’s Soundtrack” in any sort of record store—no one else can follow me down the winding path upon which my songs lead my mind. But that’s OK with me, because when it comes down to it, the only person whose emotions fit the mold my soundtrack creates is me.
Julia Cooke is a sophomore in the College. Everything she knows (or doesn’t know) about music she blames on her father and her roommates.
