Saturday Sentimentalist: the 6 Songs of Your Life

I came across a fun feature on NPR that solicited of its listeners and readers a list of the "6 Songs of Your Life." It asks you to consider the songs that "remind you of sometime or someplace or someone," calling on that place in our brains that fuse songs and memories. Narrowing it down to just six seemed torturous, when I could hear hundreds of songs and tell you what I was doing when I first heard them, or who I associate with them.

The first challenge was to figure out how to divide my life's chapters. I thought that because I'm just shy of 32, I would have the ease of smaller life increments to deal with. But now I'm thinking that a greater lifetime of perspective would actually make it easier to choose.

My list is not necessarily my most important songs, but they induce some of the strongest memories. There's a lot of music I've continued to listened to across the decades, so these are songs that have faded away enough that hearing them now take me back to that time and that place.

The 6 Songs of My Life:

1. "Walk of Life" by Dire Straits. I am maybe 4 years old. Sitting in my bedroom, somehow having gotten hold of a radio, I'm learning how to tune it to a radio station. I hear fuzz and suddenly this song soars through the speakers. To this day, that synthesized organ brings me a ridiculous amount of joy.

Here comes Lizzy singing oldies goldies...

2. "Creed" by Rich Mullins. This cassette ("A Liturgy, A Legacy, and a Ragamuffin Band") was frequently played in full, but this particular song, based on the Apostle's Creed, accompanies my first memories of pondering religion and types of Christianity without the aid of adult leaders, during a time when I attended a Christian school where many of my friends thought Catholics were not Christians. Many deep thoughts for a sixth-grader that have stuck with me today. 

3. "Got My Own Thing Now" by Squirrel Nut Zippers. After having spent a lot of time in junior high pining for an earlier era, particularly the 1940s and 50s, the Squirrel Nut Zippers got me all excited to be alive in the 90s - "Hey adults, we're not all about grunge!" I first heard this album over headphones at Barnes & Noble and bought it as soon as I had money for it, even played it for my parents, and listened to it often throughout high school.

4. "Once Around the Block" by Badly Drawn Boy. There are so many songs that make me think of college, but this one is associated with memories of different groups of people I spent time with over those four years - my friends back home in Boise who were up for adventure and exploring our hometown, my roommates in Ballard with whom I downloaded hours of music from Napster and created playlists for our room, college radio friends who expanded my indie music tastes, and the friends I made on my Jan Term trip abroad and the inside jokes that bonded us. Badly Drawn Boy was a common denominator. If we agreed on this song, we understood each other.

5. "Bubbles" by the Free Design. This song transports me back to the time when I lived in a house with a bunch of fellow grads who put on unforgettable house parties (for better or for worse); when my friend Crystal and I went to all of our friends' shows around town; when I drank the sweet drinks; and when my friends James and Kat played a bunch of records for me, including this one.

6. "Change of Time" by Josh Ritter. This last one was difficult. I've listened to so much stuff in recent years and have listened to some of it hard. But this song has floated through my brain so often that it seems like it must be significant. The secondary anthem is the part that most often gets played in my mind. "Rough seas, they carry me wherever I go." I feel like life needs lyrics that repeat like that, reminding us of coming out the other side of hardship. If I don't need this now, I know I'll need it later.