Music Monday: The Sountrack of My Formative Years

So as I've probably mentioned before, I have a borderline serious hoarding problem; every time I walk in on someone watching Hoarders on Lifestyle I can't help but feel as though the powers that be are presenting me a window into my future.

However, as I go through the motions of my bi-monthly unpack-sort through-and throw out nothing rituals, I will sometimes find something almost worthy of being considered an artifact; right diamond in the trash if you will. This time, it was the very first piece of technology I owned that legitimately bore the 'i' prefix; a metallic green iPod Nano!

 This brick of an mP3 player cost me $400, a sizeable chunk of my minimum age minimum wage paycheck, and I thought it was the best thing I had ever owned.

But it wasn't the weight of the thing in my hand, the rounded edges or the garish metallic finish, or even the sound of the 'click click click' as I scrolled through the different menus, that made my heart really swell. It was all the songs that I found, still buried inside a forgotten relic of my youth.



These were the songs that punctuated some of the fondest (and not so fond, yet still crucial) memories of my adolescence, a time when music was more important than breathing (that sounds awfully emo doesn't it? funnily enough, these were the kind of themes that seemed to run through the kind of songs I used to listen to. Nightwish anyone?). This little chunk of glass and metal and lithium is not an outdated, seemingly superfluous article of prehistoric technology; it is a time capsule of my most formative years.

I pretty much have a story that goes with every single one of these songs, and perhaps one day I will write them all down before my brain turns to goo (or I die, crushed beneath stacks of time worn Frankie magazines at the age of 45). But right now, I'm going to offer up these songs to you, songs that I had played on repeat from front door to bus stop, that I could write out in my school diary to the letter, and love more passionately than any infuriatingly oblivious adolescent boy. I hope that you, dear reader, will at the very least enjoy them, and maybe even want to weave them into the fabric of your own life.