This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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• 6 min read •

The summer I turned fifteen was a chrysalis.

It was 1992, which was 34 years and an entirely different world ago. It’s difficult to convey now how truly bored you could be as a teenager in a time before smartphones and Google and social media. If you were lucky, you spent your time waiting for something specific to happen, and the rest of the time you were waiting for just anything to happen. No quick answers or instantaneous communication. There was plenty of time to wonder and ruminate, and while that sounds like a luxury now, at 15 it could feel like a prison. I spent most nights that summer lying on my bed, my portable stereo next to my head, defacing a Lands’ End catalog that came in the mail with a ballpoint pen while listening to the radio.

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In 1992, all I had was the radio, and songs taped off the radio. I owned some cassettes and cassingles, but it wouldn’t be until the end of the summer that I would save up enough money working at the neighborhood pool to buy myself a CD player, a 5-disc player that I couldn’t afford to fill with 5 discs until that Christmas. Until then, it was me and the radio, and even that wasn’t satisfying. I would constantly scroll up and down the airwaves, from the ’50s/’60s oldies station my mom liked to the ’70s rock station my dad played in the car to the top 40 pop hits station I had outgrown two summers before, none of it scratching my itch. Until late one night, when my scroll caught a few notes of a song that was totally foreign to me, from a new college radio show that only transmitted between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m., and sometimes only came in clear if I physically kept my finger on the dial.

The fact that I had found a local station that played these unfamiliar but obviously cool songs blew the doors clean off my brain. I started staying up even later just to capture these precious, strange songs on my blank tape. Some nights I couldn’t hack it and would just put the tape in, press record, and fall asleep, then wake up like Christmas morning to sift through any new treasures I’d caught. And the brightest treasure in my net that summer was Tori Amos singing “Silent All These Years.”

Excuse me but can I be you for a while?

My dog won’t bite if you sit real still

I got the Antichrist in the kitchen yellin’ at me again

Yeah, I can hear that

I was aware of alternative music before this, mostly from movie soundtracks or other people’s older siblings, but I had no idea how to source it on my own. And even then, I was only aware of the Pixies, or the Smiths, or the Violent Femmes; cool weird dudes singing cool weird things. But to hear a cool weird GIRL singing cool weird things made me sit up straight and shoot light straight from my fingertips. Who WAS this and how could I somehow consume her?

I bought Little Earthquakes from Musicland on my next trip to the mall. I played that tape until I knew every single word, every single pause. I would play it while watching myself sing along in the mirror. I was hard at work remaking myself in this image — not exactly the image of Tori Amos, but the idea of Different. Tori Amos’s voice saying ‘Cause what if I’m a mermaid/In these jeans of his/With her name still on it? was a key that turned in my brain and unlocked the idea of If You Don’t Have to Listen to Top 40 Radio, What Else Do You Not Have to Do?

The answer, to 15-year-old me, was as basic as, “What if instead of getting jeans from the Gap, I bought… Levi’s?!” But in early-90s Tulsa, Oklahoma, this felt revelatory. I felt freed from trying to force myself into so many cookie-cutter situations. I could try to be weird and cool instead of trying unsuccessfully to be cute and popular! I could like what I liked and stop trying to please everyone! Yes, I probably would have come to this conclusion eventually on my own or by some other trigger, because that’s what adolescence is, but what a heady treat to come about it this way. I consumed Little Earthquakes and I became insufferable.

I started drawing an intricate yin-yang/sunburst tattoo on my ankle every morning with my mother’s brown Almay liquid eyeliner. I quit hanging out with some of my friends because they seemed way too normal to the new, alternative me. Instead, I would take my stereo down to the front porch in the evenings, where I would read Tom Robbins novels while hoping the older, private school kids down the block might notice me. (They did invite me to drink a can of Coors Light with them on the Fourth of July, but it was not the cultured hang I’d envisioned.)

I got in big trouble for writing the lyrics to Led Zeppelin’s “Hey Hey What Can I Do” on our foyer wall while it was stripped of wallpaper before being painted. (“I got a woman wanna BALL ALL DAY?!” my mother’s eyes bugging larger with every word.) I got grounded when, after my mother said there was no way in hell I could have dreadlocks, I decided to just stop brushing my hair for a week. This festered into a Sunday morning pre-church fight where I yelled the word “fuck” and my little brother cried. I had never felt so alive.

I did all these things through Tori who empowered me, until the day I flew too close to the sun. At my job at the pool concession stand, I had a very un-alternative crush on a blond lifeguard that predated my Tori renaissance and was proving hard to shake. Because I still had no idea how human beings signaled feelings, I decided the best way to woo him would be to causally leave Tori Amos lyrics and my yin-yang tattoo design all over the pool office — on the whiteboard, on our timecard station, on my concession stand receipt notepad. And it worked: it definitely got his attention. Only my still-forming brain didn’t clock the actual meaning of the lyrics

So you found a girl

Who thinks really deep thoughts

What’s so amazing about really deep thoughts?

Boy, you best pray that I bleed real soon

How’s that thought for you?

until the moment I watched this boy read them. He raised his eyebrows, crushed his paper snow-cone cup into the trash, and never looked at me again.

School started, and the hand-frayed hem of my Levi’s didn’t make quite the splash I’d expected, but I felt more at peace knowing I now had the fortitude to like what I liked. I bought Under the Pink and Boys for Pele, but they never hit the same as Little Earthquakes.

I saw Tori perform live when I was in college, and I remember feeling annoyed by the presence of her glittery, fairy-winged fan base — I would have preferred Tori sing directly to me in a dark theater, the way she felt in my brain back in 1992. It was a whole room full of sweet weirdos, each one of us certain that we were secretly the weirdest.

I’m so thankful to have found “Silent All These Years.” As much as the lyrics spoke to me, I needed the feeling of discovering it all by myself, not from a movie or a friend, but on my own late-night journey across the radio waves, alone in my dark teenage bedroom. Tori Amos’s croons and howls were the primordial goo my personality started blooming in. Her cool weirdness emboldened my not-cool weirdness long enough for me to learn to rein it in a little, and realize you could wear whatever jeans you wanted so long as you’d found the right song to sing in your head. ◆

About Sarah

Sarah Brown used to document her life online, back when the internet was still one cooling, giant continent full of oversharing weirdos, and it didn’t matter yet what anyone’s kitchen looked like. She now lives a more private existence but writes about fancy candles and lip balm on her Instagram account, @affluentdetritus.

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• 4 min read •

In 1987, I was a bookish but irreverent high school senior in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with predictable music tastes: the Beatles; college rock; some jazz and classical. This being the peak of “new age” music, Michael Hedges and George Winston also made the mix, and one day, I bought a record that looked to come from that soothing realm: Rounder’s New Acoustic Music Sampler. The tracks were indeed acoustic, but earthier than the Windham Hill stuff — less candlelight; more campfire. My favorite, the burbling “Intro,” came from 1982’s Fluxedo, by dobroist Jerry Douglas.

At college that fall, on my maiden pilgrimage to Philadelphia’s Tower Records (a total wonderland — it had a freaking escalator), I found Fluxedo. I loved it, and while I still mostly listened to the Feelies, New Order, Replacements, etc., I kept exploring Douglas’s catalog. His new album, Changing Channels, was gauzy and boring. But 1979’s Fluxology had the refined twang of Fluxedo alongside bluegrass standards like “Wheel Hoss.” It burbled, but it also ripped.

After graduation, I moved back to Winston. I fell in love and got my heart broken, badly. I felt dissolved, nullified — I couldn’t compute, could barely speak.

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One late winter day, a letter came from a college friend, written on the back of a flyer for the Merle Watson Memorial Festival, happening in Wilkesboro, just an hour up the road. Amid the sprawling lineup, he had circled one name: Jerry Douglas. Three-day student tickets were $18, so I xeroxed my ID and sent a check for $36, and on the last weekend in April 1992, my high school buddy Andrew and I headed to Wilkesboro.

Douglas’s set was sweet indeed, but just a morsel within a weekend-long feast of mind-blowing chops, impossibly tight vocal harmonies, and sheer exuberance. No mumbling slackers disavowing their entertainer status; uncomplicated, unabashed entertainment was the point. Riders in the Sky’s corny-clever cowboy schtick included fucking lasso tricks.

Imbuing everything was host Doc Watson, manifesting kindly country cool, albeit with a poignant cast, having lost Merle, his musical partner and son, just seven years earlier. Watson, blind since childhood, was led onstage over and over to sit in with Ricky Skaggs or Peter Rowan, or to play a set of his own — cuing solos with a quick “Pick it, Ricky!” “Tell ‘em about it, Jack!” And whenever he said “Lemme get one,” he tore it up.

The crowd utterly adored Doc. I adored Doc. And I adored the crowd — everyone radiated pure pleasure, and the joy was infectious. When virtuosic freak Mark O’Connor steered a solo fiddle piece into a blazing cyclical riff resembling Terry Riley, the guy in front of Andrew and me leaned towards his friend and drawled, “Bill, I think we lost ‘im.” We cracked up, and he turned, grinning, pleased as punch. While the audience was as racially homogeneous as you might suspect, a palpable kinship united good ol’ boys and soccer moms, barefoot farm kids and barefoot preppy-hippies — NASCAR and NARAL, living in harmony.

The communal ethos extended to practical matters: when the gates opened each morning, folks spread out their blankets and camp chairs in front of the stage. But it was understood that when they broke to have lunch or wade in the nearby creek, you could borrow their spot, even sit in their chairs, until they returned. Andrew and I perched a lot that weekend, and on Sunday afternoon, as the crowd started heading home for good, we moved way up front, sitting next to a couple young dudes who had driven from Canada — from, like, Manitoba. This wasn’t their first fest, and while I was excited about the band setting up — which included Tony Rice, Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, Mark O’Connor, Jerry Douglas, and Mark Schatz, all of whom I knew from the Rounder compilation — they were ecstatic, immediately yelling “‘Whitewater’! Play ‘Whitewater’!” explaining that it was a ripper off Fleck’s album Drive that featured most of the players onstage. We watched in wonder as these six wizards took turns picking songs and singing lead, playing 100% off the dome at 100 miles an hour. About three tunes in, Tony Rice pointed at the crowd and said “Somebody out there yelled ‘Whitewater.’” And they destroyed it. Holy sheep shit.

I felt transformed by the festival — by the music, yes, but even more by the sense of communion, of a great society. I didn’t give up the Velvet Underground, but for the next five years, I went deep into bluegrass history, hosted a bluegrass radio show, hit more festivals. Bluegrass fans talk about their conversion experiences, and the 1992 Merle Watson Memorial Festival was undoubtedly mine, born of a seed planted five years earlier, a song with a prophetic title. ◆

Postscript: The videos are available by pure serendipity; North Carolina Public Television had filmed the festival, subsequently airing a series of performances and eventually compiling a two-hour movie called Pickin’ for Merle.

About Nick

Nick Rubin lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. He runs a tutoring company; co-hosts a community radio show; plays music; and wages war with creeping Charlie and Japanese stiltgrass.

Instagram, X, Bsky @nickvrubin

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Shawna Pochan (No. 110)

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• 4 min read •

Content warning - this post briefly mentions self-harm

I was 12 years old when I first heard this song on TV. The music video was the last one to play on a music video show I watched at the time (the channel was some offshoot of Fuse that DirecTV offered back then, and for the life of me I can’t find evidence of its existence). I remember the fascination I felt when watching. The fantastical elements and 2D animation caught my eye, as well as ratty-looking Bert McCracken singing in fancy costume with the rest of the band. Later, I went on YouTube to listen to more of The Used’s In Love and Death album and proceeded to spend the rest of the night downloading their entire discography on LimeWire.

“All That I’ve Got” hit a nerve for me. I felt very isolated at the time, but I couldn’t find the words for it until I heard Bert yelling “I’m far from lonely and it’s all that I’ve got” during the chorus. It was true then, and is frankly still true now. I had some confidence that my family would be there for me no matter what, yet I was aware that they were all that I had at the time, and I felt guilty for wanting more.

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I didn’t have friends in school, and the one girl who did hang out with me eventually made it clear she was barely tolerating me. I was abandoned midyear for a group of louder, funnier girls, and my new routine was to head straight home after school and into the bathroom. I had a pair of nail scissors that I’d press onto some hidden part of my skin until it left a mark, but didn’t draw any blood. I didn’t have the stomach for that, and although I felt like a jackass for not even fully committing to self-harm, I feared my parents’ discovery too much to go any further. In due time I met my best friend, and despite the jubilance of finally having someone I could actually talk to, I never brought up my scissors to her.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2020. By the time the first Covid-19 wave hit, I found myself feeling isolated again. I had broken up with my partner of less than a year, convinced I was stupid for thinking there was even a chance that someone so beautiful could actually fully desire me. But I managed to coast through this isolation period via Zoom calls with my college friends — until one late night in October when I returned to my middle school playlists and relistened to “All That I’ve Got.”

By the time the chorus repeated for a second time, I was bawling my eyes out. I experienced a full-on breakdown. My entire life’s insecurity and hurt was being sung and shouted at me in those four minutes, and I felt so stripped and raw by the end that I didn’t even have the energy to hate myself for feeling that way.

For years I believed that every small mistake and social faux pas I made warranted cruelty to my being. I thought I shouldn’t have anything to complain about because I had it all: loving friends and family, a roof over my head, food in my stomach. Yet something was terribly wrong. It wasn’t until that moment, crying at my desk in front of my laptop, that I understood that punishing myself would never help me heal. I realized that my pain deserves to be acknowledged; that I am allowed to fully grieve things like the death of a friend, and all the times I’ve been physically and emotionally violated. And my grief can be unabashedly sad and angry.

When I looked out my window and saw the sunrise, I knew this wouldn’t be the last time I’d have a moment like this. But it was the first time a moment like this forced me to begin accepting my suffering. I still have a lot of work ahead of me; I have to continually remember to allow myself to hope for better and accept the care my loved ones offer. I have to believe that the people I love do love me back.

It took me over a year to finally start seeing a therapist. It took even longer to reach out to old friends and muster the courage to tell the love of my life just how much I missed and needed them, how scared I was to let them know that back in 2020. I’ve had a variety of highs and lows since then. However, I know now that I’m not alone in this hodgepodge of feelings, and I never was.

There’s more to life than uncertainty about the future and the weight of old hurts.

No matter how unlikely it’ll seem sometimes, I’ll be more than “just fine.” ◆

About Daysi

Daysi Sanchez is a graduate student, a manager at a corporate cafeteria, and a writer. You can expect her to be doing the following outside of work: haunting Troutman Street, petting her dog Johnny, or writing in her journal while hunched over in a shrimp-like manner.

Instagram @si.como.la.flor

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Sal Kimura (No. 072)

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• 4 min read •

I’ve been a metalhead for as long as I can remember. One of my first memories of childhood was listening to “Electric Funeral” by Black Sabbath in the front passenger seat of my dad’s Corvette when I was probably two or three (it was the early ’80s, safety regulations certainly weren’t what they are today). I remember grasping the handle above the glove compartment and banging my head to “Paranoid” and my proud father smiling ear to ear. I still remember that feeling of excitement in my chest and electricity in my brain. That’s the drug I’ve been chasing for over 40 years now.

My parents were very young when they had me. They were 20 and were just a couple of kids raising me in Aurora, a suburb of Denver, Colorado. But it was because they were so young (and incredibly cool and liberal) that I was exposed to all the same stuff they liked and were still discovering as young adults. R-rated movies, hard rock and metal music, jokes and comedy specials that were very adult — anything short of actual porn wasn’t off-limits for me. They treated me like a little adult. My mom used to love saying, “We want to raise you to be an adult.” So, I took on the responsibility of discussing what I was seeing and hearing with them, and they made sure I was able to understand and process it (and that I wasn’t going to grow up to be some weirdo serial killer).

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In my household there were a few bands and artists that absolutely stood above everyone else. First, it was the Beatles. My mom was a Beatles fanatic. She still is. My dad was into stuff that was a bit heavier; he loved Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and all the great rock bands of the 1970s. Growing up I was exposed to music from the ’50s all the way up through the modern stuff of the day. Music was a huge part of our family. The three of us always sang along in the car (poorly) and I really treasure those moments.

Being a very young (but surprisingly hip) little kid, I watched MTV the night it premiered with my parents. It was revolutionary. It literally changed my entire world overnight. Ozzy Osbourne liked to say that the first time he heard the Beatles, it was like he was living in a black and white world that suddenly turned to color. Nothing resonated with me more than that the first time I heard it said that way.

One summer day in August I was watching MTV, and I saw the band and heard the song that changed my life forever: Judas Priest’s “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’.” The world didn’t just turn to color; it was full of raging guitars and soaring vocals too.

The video for “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’” felt like it was specifically made for me. I couldn’t explain it then and I have trouble explaining it now. But it is, without a doubt, still my favorite song still to this day. It was strong, powerful, and so damned inspiring too. It spoke of taking advantage of your life, it told me to make the most of opportunities and to create opportunities for myself. For my three-year-old brain, this was like a lightning bolt hitting me square in the face. It was great music, but for me it was really about empowerment.

Seeing these guys in black, studded leather with lasers shooting off around them as they played this loud, aggressive, but still somehow hooky and digestible music with those incredible vocals from Rob Halford reshaped the entire world for me. I sat there in front of the massive TV in our den and was just stunned. This was EVERYTHING.

I went to my mom and said that I needed the tape… now. She giggled when I told her I wanted a Judas Priest record; I can only imagine what she was thinking in her head. The rule was that I needed to earn the money, so I “did chores,” which consisted of helping to put groceries away and cleaning my room. I was only three, so the tasks she made me do were simple, but she wanted to instill a life lesson.

Soon, my parents took me down the street to Budget Tapes & Records and we walked into what was a very familiar place for me. I can still remember the joy I had going in there. I looked at my mom and expected her to speak for me, but she looked at me and said, “You’re the one buying the tape, you need to ask for it.” This was a big moment for me. I looked the clerk right in the eye and said, “I’d like Screaming for Vengeance by Judas Priest, please.”

The guy was probably no older than 25, and his face lit up with the biggest grin. He walked me over to the wall with the tapes, pulled it out for me, and led me back to the register. I had a $10 bill in my pocket, and he reached over the counter to get it from me and to give me my change. I felt like an adult. I felt so accomplished. This is what the song was talking about!

We got in my mom’s baby blue 280ZX and I asked if we could listen to my tape. My parents couldn’t wipe the beaming smiles from their faces. Those first riffs from “The Hellion” filled the air as we made our drive back home, where I proceeded to listen to that tape (and especially “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’”) for months and years to come. ◆

About Sean

Sean McNally is a progressive-minded guy living in Jacksonville, Florida and works in financial services. He’s been happily married for 21 years to his incredible and beautiful wife, Sherri. He likes music, movies, watching sports, collecting comic books, and cooking.

Instagram @ankhenaten91

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• 3 min read •

Anyone who knows me knows I love Lady Gaga. From the moment I first saw her music video for “Just Dance” on VH1’s Jump Start while getting ready for school, to the present day, traveling the country and abroad to the beaches of Rio de Janeiro to see her, my identity has been heavily shaped by Lady Gaga. But I want to take you back to a very specific moment.

Picture it: it’s the spring of 2011, and the world is a very different place. Covid-19 is nonexistent, eggs aren’t expensive, and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” has just been repealed. Then there’s me. A fresh 17-year-old finishing up his junior year of high school, still trying to understand, acknowledge, and accept himself at a time when being gay is becoming less taboo and a progressive liberation is underway. Lady Gaga’s Born This Way album explodes upon its global release, filled with chart-topping anthems, club-defining hits, and rebellious meaning. It quickly becomes the soundtrack of my life. One song, however, stands out.

When I first heard “Hair,” I was immediately pulled in. While it’s sonically a timeless marvel that blends Euro-pop club beats with melodies influenced by classic rock, its lyrics convey something more profound.

For years, I struggled to accept my sexuality. It was a long ordeal that even involved religious consultations with a pastor from my childhood. I had already experienced (and enjoyed) relations with men, however, a lingering fear of rejection and disappointment fueled my ongoing confusion and heartache. I longed for a sense of peace. I feared spiraling as the burden of shame, depression, and lack of self-worth became crippling. How could I help myself without feeling judgment or guilt?

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I remember hitting repeat on “Hair” like I was chasing a high. It became a daily mantra. I found comfort in the messages of individuality and freedom of expression. The rebellious and intuitive way Gaga expressed herself through her hair, a feature so many of us either underestimate or take for granted, was representative of her — and my — yearning for freedom from societal norms. It was awe-inspiring. As a teenager continuing to navigate who I was, “Hair” brought clarity.

Hearing that electrifying chorus…

I’ve had enough, this is my prayer

That I’ll die living just as free as my hair

I’ve had enough, I’m not a freak

I just keep fightin’ to stay cool on these streets

I’ve had enough, enough, enough

And this is my prayer, I swear

I’m as free as my hair

I’m as free as my hair

I am my hair

I am my hair

It did more than change me.

It saved me.

To this day, I credit “Hair” for pulling me back from a place that I may not have been able to return from on my own. It provided light in my life, especially in moments of darkness. It brought me understanding, acceptance, and peace.

Though my world has changed a thousand times in the 15 years since “Hair” was released, there is still a sense of peace that comes to me with every listen.

(And yes, I do recognize the irony given that I barely have any hair myself these days. Thank you, genetics!)

The fact that I have the opportunity to reflect on how I have been able to grow, and how I’m exactly who I’m supposed to be — how I have been able to enjoy such beautiful moments at her concerts and build relationships with some of the most amazing people I know — speaks volumes about the impact of not just the song, but the artist behind it. She knows how to extend her hand and pull us “Little Monsters” out.

While, at times, months can pass between listens, I still hold “Hair” close to my heart and know that it will always be there for me. ◆

About Aaron

Aaron Stewart was born and raised in Virginia. While he is a devout Little Monster (Lady Gaga fan), he admires music that spans multiple genres and generations. His other passions include traveling, food, and his cats.

Instagram @aarontstewart

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• 5 min read •

Brown couch. Yellow afternoon. Messy hair. Headphones. Discman spinning on my lap. I’d wanted one for months. Finally, a nice enough paycheck from laying down pepperonis at Pizza Hut to allow me this privacy, this volume.

I had to listen to music quietly when Dave was home. The angry voice on the other side of the bedroom door said so. I missed being able to curl up inside of a song the way I used to before this man came along and set up dominion under my mother’s roof. Gone were the long, sweet evenings at home alone with my sister while our mother was at work, huddled around the boombox on the living room floor, each of us with an ear pressed to the speaker, singing. He was always there now. And he had a lot of rules.

A brand new copy of Radiohead’s OK Computer swirled behind the window in the cover of the Discman. Songs I’d never heard before, one after another, and my thumb ever-inching the little black wheel of the volume up, up, up. I sat in the yellow light of a southern California afternoon in autumn with eyes closed, trying to forget where I was. The reality of things. How hard it had been. How mean and how lonely. Lonely as a tinkling electric guitar, melancholic and tender. The sudden build of a bassline pulsing quick and hard as my forever-anxious heart. Swirling, insistent, pleading lyrics. A voice cut loose and soaring, freer than mine had ever been, stepping off the ledge of heartache into an impossible hope.

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Shell smashed, juicing flowing. My breath quickened and became irregular. My shoulders shook. I couldn’t control them. Wings twitch, legs are going. Eyes flickering behind their tight lids, rushing with tears, bolted shut against the view of that depressing all-brown living room. I’d never felt at home here. Not under this roof and not in this town. Let down and hanging around. Then, the memory of a different yellow afternoon the year before. My stepfather and I alone on the back porch.

“If I had a signed guarantee from God that, not only would you graduate, but that you’d graduate at the top of your class, and that you’d not only pay back the student loan but go on to become a world-famous artist, I still wouldn’t cosign a loan for you to go to art school.”

I was 17 years old.

The first time I met Dave, he yelled at me. He yelled at me for being on the phone when he’d come to pick my mother up for their very first date. Horrified, I watched my mother breeze out the front door on his arm. Soon, he was under our roof and the yelling never stopped. He called me names and made sure I knew how much he didn’t like me. Dave would keep time of our showers. He banged on doors and barked orders. He measured out how much milk we could drink. He chose what glass we could drink it from. He grounded me for two weeks for forgetting to turn off the fan in my bedroom before leaving for school one morning, “It could’ve thrown a spark and burned the whole house down.”

Dave grounded me for two weeks for pretty much anything. Ten minutes late coming home from school and I would be grounded. During those two weeks, he made sure life was as miserable as possible and that I knew how worthless and unwanted I was. He read my diary and mockingly quoted it to me. He told me that until I turned 18, I was his property and that anything that came from me was his property, too. My mother never commented negatively upon any of this, nor put a stop to it. She shrugged. She defended him. Crushed like a bug in the ground.

I started ditching school. Eventually, I ran away from home. Twice. I remember the last cop who came to our front door to ensure I was really back home before lifting the Missing Persons Report saying to my angry stepfather, “Kids don’t run away for no reason. Especially not girls.”

That yellow afternoon on the couch, as the lyrics rushed into my ears, volume high, my eyes flooding with tears, I felt my mind change. The refrain that had been playing in my brain on loop for years of I-CAN’T-GO-ON-LIVING-HERE became I-WILL-NOT-DIE-IN-THIS-TOWN. One day, I am gonna grow wings.

For the next seven years, I spent as much time as I could inside the art department at the community college in my hometown, holding tight the knowledge contained in that single lyric; the knowledge that other people managed to build lives that fit them, lives that didn’t make them want to run away.

I kept my job at Pizza Hut and worked as a maid, then as a cocktail waitress in a strip club, before landing a job at an art supply store. There wasn’t much talk of college at home, nor any encouragement to go. I paid for my books and tuition on my own. I took painting classes at night and held that song in my head as I moved the oil paint I’d pocketed from work across cheap canvas, repeating that solitary, pleading lyric against the reality I was stuck in. One day, I am gonna grow wings.

I took every art class available, repeating them as many times as I could until I was barred from enrolling again, begging special permission from the department head to make an allowance for me just one more time. One day, I am gonna grow wings.

On September 3^rd, 2005 at 9 a.m., the morning of my 25^th birthday, I walked into my first class at California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, CA. I sat down at a drawing horse, no longer in need of anyone’s signature other than my own. One day. Where you are. Where you are. Where you are. ◆

About Angela

Angela Simione is an artist living in New York City.

Instagram @angelasimione

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• 5 min read •

“Livin’ on the Edge” by Aerosmith marked an absolute paradigm shift in my musical taste. It set the path not only for what I listen to but how I express myself.

As a child in the ’80s, my tastes were pretty conventional. From my parents’ collection, I got the Beatles, the Beach Boys, John Denver, and crucially Paul Simon. From the radio, film soundtracks, and just the background culture of the time, I got plenty of ’80s pop — Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston. The essentials.

The music I started choosing as I grew older was rap — often the goofy stuff. DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were the first artists I’d really consider “my music,” and they led me to compilations like Rap Traxx 2 and X-Tendamix Dance Mix ’92 — the first CD I ever owned, as the first in my family to even have a CD player. I got it on reward points during my years delivering newspapers for the Nanaimo Daily Free Press.

The one thing I definitely avoided was guitar music. My brother Dan is three years older than me, and we were about as different as you can be while parented by the same two people. I had glasses, was bookish and confident. Dan fancied himself a rebel and was easily persuadable. In the late ’80s, he determined that his music was heavy metal (we used the term very loosely) — Def Leppard, Poison, Kiss. Loud, low, and aiming to offend. He grew a rat tail just to piss off our mom.

Since I was clearly so different from him, his music was clearly not mine. Anything with guitars — especially distorted ones — was heavy metal and therefore Dan’s music and therefore nothing to bother with. Screaming vocals? No thank you.

(The one thing we agreed on was Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet. Yes, it had guitars, big hair, and metal stylings for the album cover. But Aunt Barb — ten years our mother’s junior — played it, and that made it enjoyable common ground.)

It was a strange experience, therefore, to listen to LG73 — one of Vancouver’s “all hits” radio stations — play the Top 8 at 8 and get transfixed by a song that by rights should repel me. Lightly overdriven guitars making a jangly lick over a persistent drone and an acoustic strum, with a big kick drum building the anticipation. The guitars get louder and crunchier in the chorus, Steven Tyler screams, there’s a wanky guitar solo, and it’s a sprawling, epic song. Yet I was hooked.

Partly, I think, the lyrical message pulled me in. I reused sandwich containers for school lunches, convinced the parents council to buy recycling bins for every classroom, campaigned to save the rainforest. I knew, as Tyler sang, that “Something’s wrong with the world today.” He wasn’t singing about cars, chicks, or Satan, but social disharmony and environmental degradation. His urgency as well as, finally, his optimism appealed to me.

There may also have been a through line to the rap music I loved. I would later learn that Aerosmith had one of the first rap-rock collaborations, with Run-DMC on “Walk This Way,” but my undiscriminating ear could hear hip-hop cadences in the bridge:

Tell me what you think about your situation

Complication, aggravation

Is getting to you

If Chicken Little tells you that the sky is falling

Even if it wasn’t, would you still come crawling

Back again?

I bet you would, my friend

Again, and again, and again, and again, and again

It was righteous and clear in its accusation. I loved it.

I turned 14 a month after Aerosmith released the album Get a Grip, and you bet your ass it was on my wish list. My parents got it for me — on cassette, so I could listen on my Walkman during my paper route. I don’t know how they felt about it: “Oh no, the sensible one wants this awful music, too.”

And it did prove my gateway. The riff on “Eat the Rich” just slammed, “Cryin’” was brilliant, and I could not pretend this wasn’t my brother’s kind of music. I was converted. For his part, Dan was pivoting to — guess what? — rap. Gangsta rap, of course, with a special fondness for Tupac Shakur that endures to this day. His first tattoo fixed “Thug Life” to his shoulder in heavy gothic script, just to piss off our mom.

And me? From Aerosmith, it was a quick remedial run through Seattle grunge. 1994 became the annus mirabilis of Canadian alt-rock, and that was also the year I bought a guitar and started making my own music, a habit that, like my brother’s tattoo, hasn’t gone away.

Aerosmith, like my brother’s rat tail, did get cut off, however. By grunge purity standards, they were far too cock-rocky and commercial. As if to prove the point, they would have a huge hit with the shitty ballad for that asteroid movie — a song that ’80s me would have loved. But Get a Grip and its lead single “Livin’ on the Edge” were my Bing Bong in that incredible scene from Inside Out: the essential motor to get me out of the deep hole of latent culture and inherited musical taste, up to the high plateau of my own burgeoning interests and passions. Like Bing Bong, it didn’t make the journey with me, but it got me where I needed to be. ◆

About Michael

Michael Munnik is a songwriter and scholar living in Cardiff, Wales. Before emigrating to the UK, he fulfilled a lifelong dream as a radio journalist for CBC in Ottawa, Canada.

Bluesky @michaelmunnik.bsky.social

Website michaelmunnik.ca

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• 4 min read •

We don’t choose what catches us in a moment of deep grief, just as we don’t choose when tragedy finds us. Sometimes it arrives as a phone call from a morgue on a cold Monday evening in March while you’re playing The Sims on your parent’s desktop computer, unaware of life’s stakes and only concerned with building the best digital house for your ideal girl band.

At fourteen I was learning for the first time that people who are supposed to take care of you are struggling to take care of themselves, and things that are supposed to make sense feel more like decorations on a set that falls flat the minute you can’t support your participation in it. I also learned morgue secretaries are faster at making phone calls than hospitals or your parents.

When my grandmother passed away suddenly, I was left with my MP3 player and a lot of free time since I vowed not to play The Sims anymore to avoid summoning another family death — at least for that year. I would take long walks to Odesa’s seaside and put my player on shuffle, hoping to hear something that would temporarily fill the emptiness I felt right below my heart. Of the ten songs I downloaded that month, one perfectly scored the scene as I traced cold, misty circles in the sand with my winter boots.

My parents didn’t introduce me to their favorite musical artists and never made me listen to their record collection. Not that they had one. Nor did they show me movies they liked, which encouraged my solo exploration of all things art and heavily contributed to feelings of resentment when I came across people marinated in their parents’ taste. It’s like meeting people who learned how to cook from their family; undeniably and enviably sexy, and they don’t even deserve the full credit. I was on my own with Google and the illegal film library of the VK platform, where I found Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and promptly downloaded its soundtrack onto my player some time before my grandmother’s death.

My best music discoveries would continue to come from films, and later, in college, a professor would say it’s a cheap directorial trick to increase emotion in a scene that doesn’t rise there on its own. But like every fourteen-year-old, I thought life itself didn’t rise to the required level of emotion on its own, and so I’d download these soundtrack pieces for personal scoring opportunities. It helped that both my life and this sad Jim Carrey film featured cold walks on the beach.

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If you listen to the Korgis’ original version of “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime,” it has all the elements of a sad love ballad that you can still slow dance to. It reminds me of 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love,” and in that way feels more romantic than sorrowful. The version I discovered was a cover by Beck that strips down the ’80s elements of the original to a haunting minimalism. The first fifteen seconds draw you into a somber collection of chords that feel like a symphony of hung-up landline phone calls. To this day, they make me feel like I can hear my own heartbeat in a very crowded space. It’s exactly the feeling of having your world upended and sewn back down while you try to connect with reality.

Then Beck’s husky vocals come in to really drive home the after-the-punch feeling in your guts. We are starting in a pretty empty place, but slowly other instruments come in and the guitar strings add a sweetness that allows for feelings of grief to emerge over initial shock. At least that’s how it felt in my body at that age. The drums add a sense of marching strength and the comforting “mmhhmmh” Beck adds at the end of some lines is a great self-soothing trick I picked up as well. I don’t want to say this piece of music taught me to grieve, but I can’t remember anything else that held me at the time.

I had just started to take my English lessons more seriously and was determined to learn all the lyrics to the songs I was listening to. This one was easy enough for me not to Google. On a general note, I recommend grieving in another language, as it makes things feel much more manageable. You can kind of use the distance of the words to cushion the blow. You can use it as an isolation cord for the open electrical circuit that is your mind and body in the wake of loss.

That cold March turned into a cold April and eventually into a warm May. I watched a different movie and downloaded the next soundtrack onto my MP3 player. I skipped “Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime” for the next ten years with occasional exceptions for the death anniversary. Listening to it recently, though, I realized that over time I’ve grown capable of being more present with the grief that this song first taught me to bear. Mirroring the song’s structure, I now see it as a hopeful reminder of the love I felt for someone who is long, long gone. The pain has subsided into an honoring. ◆

About Masha

Masha Makutonina is a Ukrainian videomaker, playwright, and audio producer from Odesa, Ukraine, now residing in New York. She has acted in NYU’s production of The Clear Blue Skies: Diaries from Ukraine. Her play Steppe, which she wrote and directed, has had a three-show run as a part of the Global Form Theatre Festival at Rattlestick Theatre in June 2023. Her play They Are Quits was a part of 938 Collective’s Short Play Festival at Dixon Theatre as well as Secret Theatre’s short play competition in summer of 2024. Her short film was recently screened at the 938 Collective’s showing at Cobble Hill cinema. Masha loves exploring hopeless futures of spaces and characters that are brought into dialogue by them.

Website mashamakutonina.neocities.org

Instagram @masha_makut

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This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

Enjoying the series? Support here to keep the good stuff coming 😊

• 5 min read •

Rise up this morning, smiled with the rising sun…

I walked out the door, bags packed and ready, a teenager who’d never really lived away from home. My mom came out behind me. About to lock the door, she paused, turned to me, and — in a concerned voice working quietly to keep its composure — asked, “Do you have Bob Marley with you?” I pulled a cassette mixtape out of my jacket pocket (blazer arms always rolled up, I felt a kinship with the guys in the Specials, the English Beat, and their ska ilk; more punk-adjacent than well-dressed). “Yep,” I said with a little smile. Marley occupied one side of that tape. “Good,” she added, “’cause when it gets tough you have to go back to the roots,” and she locked the door behind us.

Don’t worry ’bout a thing, cause every little thing gonna be alright

Summer 1986, leaving for the airport to fly to Pittsburgh, I was a 17-year-old heading out into the wild world on my own for the first time for real. Eager to begin studying aeronautical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, not knowing then that engineering would be a one-year stepping stone towards an industrial design degree — with minors in photography, French, and German — and, later, decades as a designer in the United States and Europe.

Singing sweet songs…

Check my pockets any time during high school and you’d likely find:

1. A guitar pick

I began playing guitar and bass in my early teens and was obsessed. I had one in hand whenever possible, sculpting my fingers into new shapes that would end up etched into my muscle memory.

2. Oodles of Noodles instant ramen

In the ’80s the pickings for a vegetarian were slim to none. A growing boy had to be prepared! “Vegetarian alternative” was not really a phrase yet. Nutrition, apparently not a concern.

3. A cassette tape

Filled with my favorite band of the moment, always ready for a stereo, boombox, walkman, or car radio to appear. One album would occupy each side of the tape for weeks, or even months, eventually rotating out.

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The Cure, the Specials, R.E.M. (Murmur & Reckoning). Sometimes a mixtape passed from friend to friend, or sibling, quality eroding with each copy of a copy, made it into my pocket — like the one named “waste don’t youth you,” full of punk, pop, new wave, subversive music only broadcast on college radio. But Bob Marley was a constant, an old-time favorite, “mom music,” along with the likes of the Grateful Dead, James Taylor, Richie Havens, Cat Stevens, Carole King, Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and many more. Even Lionel Richie and the Sugarhill Gang would join the mix of music from home sometimes, but rarely did they inhabit my pocket tapes.

... melodies pure and true

My world was a lot smaller then.

Traveling beyond the east coast was barely imaginable.

A lack of interest in sleepaway camp as a kid was just as well since my hippie parents didn’t have money for that anyway. Having been in and out of the hospital due to a serious asthma problem as a small child, perhaps all the days, weeks, and on one occasion over a month spent there at such a tender age removed any childhood inclination towards solo wanderlust.

The previous summer was the only time I’d been away from home for a longer period on my own, on a grant for political science and computer programming summer courses at Yale. Room and board included. Though my dorm was only a 15-minute walk away, I went home just once during those eight weeks. Being so close by, it was a low-stakes first flight from the nest. But interesting new worlds began to open academically and socially while I was there, and after that experience I had no trepidation about leaving home when it was time to leave for college.

In the decades since, I’ve been able to visit and live in different places across the United States, for work and play, and to travel extensively throughout Europe and Asia, including multiple trips to Japan, China, and Singapore.

Unfathomable before.

I was born in Midtown Manhattan, just north of Hell’s Kitchen, in 1968. My dad has lived in Brooklyn since then. His Irish-American parents had shallow roots in New York and Boston, and deep roots in Ireland. Cork and Limerick on his school teacher mom Marie’s side, and Longford on his NYPD and Army officer dad Tom’s side. Close enough for my dad and his brother to have dual citizenship, but distant enough for him to never have actually been to the Emerald Isle.

When I was about five years old, my 18-month-older brother and I ended up with our mom and stepdad, Steve, in New Haven when they were both, against all logical odds, accepted to matriculate at Yale University; mom for undergrad, Steve for architecture. This was especially unimaginable and unlikely for a young, poor, black mother of two from a working-class family in New York, only a few years after Yale had decided to begin allowing women to study as undergraduates. My brother and I did most of our growing up in that ivory-tower/wild-west town, and it was apparent that our little sister was in our mom’s belly when she graduated in 1975. Mom ended up going back to Yale in the early ’80s for a master’s of graphic design, subsequently becoming a professor there for many years. We’re pretty sure she’s the first woman with both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Yale to have a child (my brother) who earned three Yale diplomas as well.

Not bad work for a girl born into a working-class family in New York just after World War II. Her father, Willie, came from the South, a black man with roots in enslavement, and, further back, some Native American ancestry. He made his way to New York and became a career bus driver. Her mother, Mary, was a homemaker and part-time house cleaner, born to an Afro-Caribbean family from Saint Kitts.

This is my message to you-ou-ou

“Going back to the roots” could have many different meanings. I didn’t reflect deeply upon it back then. But I played music every day in college — in my room, in bands, everywhere — and that was surely crucial in keeping enough balance to persevere.

Don’t worry ’bout a thing, cause every little thing gonna be alright

This song is simply joy. ◆

About Joshua

Joshua Murray grew up on the east coast of the USA, but he has been living in Malmö, Sweden the past 30 years and is the father of a 15-year-old. He also spends some of his free time at his girlfriend’s countryside house on the Danish Baltic Sea island of Bornholm. Josh is a musician (guitar, bass, vocals) who’s played continuously in bands since he was 15 years old, and he’s worked as an industrial designer his entire career. His current free time activity of choice is bouldering.

Instagram @moofboo_josh

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Chances are high

Whether you realize it or not, it’s likely that the music you listen to today exists thanks to black musicians in history. Entire genres of music have emerged and evolved in the last century because of trailblazers like Sister Rosetta Tharpe in the ’30s, Bo Diddley in the ’50s, and Eddie Hazel in the ’70s.

You can hear their influence everywhere — rock, pop, R&B, jazz, hip-hop, alternative, even punk.

Today we’re taking a special look at legendary black guitarists — from the musician credited with “the greatest guitar solo of all time” to the lesser-known virtuosos. These musicians’ innovation, experimentation, and technical skill made history, inspiring and impacting generations of artists.

This is by no means a comprehensive list, but these are some of the greats that have shaped music as we know it today:

1. Sister Rosetta Tharpe

American singer, songwriter, and guitarist
When: 1930s and 1940s

The basics

• b. 1915 - d. 1973 (aged 58)

• “The Godmother of rock and roll”

• Known for her unique mix of electric guitar and spiritual lyrics

• Became the first big recording star of gospel music

• Controversial among conservative religious groups because she performed in nightclubs

Her guitar style

• Spirited guitar playing with heavy distortion

• Aggressive picking, heavy-gauge strings

• Frequent use of double-stops (playing two notes at once) and chromaticism (using notes outside the key)

Why she’s important

• Widely considered one of the founders of rock and roll

• One the first big recording artists to use heavy distortion on her electric guitar

• Her 1945 hit “Strange Things Happening Every Day“ has been called the first rock and roll record

• Influenced early rock musicians like Johnny Cash, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Little Richard, and Elvis Presley

Watch Sister Rosetta Sharpe play guitar

A compilation of her guitar solos

2. Eddie Hazel

American guitarist and singer
When: 1970s

The basics

• b. 1950 - d. 1992 (aged 42)

• Lead guitarist for Parliament-Funkadelic

• Renowned for his emotional, psychedelic, and technically gifted playing

• Ranked no. 29 on Rolling Stone’s list of the Greatest Guitarists of All Time

His guitar style

• Razor sharp rhythm player

• Used a lot of reverb and played with “all the gadgets in the world”

• Unique, virtuoso ability to switch between intense funk rhythms and melodic, soaring solos

Why he’s important

• Helped define Parliament-Funkadelic’s signature sound

• His 10-minute guitar solo in the Funkadelic song “Maggot Brain” is regarded as one of the greatest solos of all time on any instrument

• Heavily influenced future generations of artists; often sampled in hip-hop, e.g. Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg

Watch Eddie Hazel play guitar

Live in 1979

3. Beverly “Guitar” Watkins

American blues guitarist
When: 1950s - 2000s

The basics

• b. 1939 - d. 2019 (aged 80)

• Known as the “Queen of the Blues Guitar”

• Shredded guitar on stage with James Brown, Aretha Franklin, B.B. King, and Ray Charles since her teen years

• Achieved critical acclaim later in life thanks to the internet, recorded her first solo album at 60

Her guitar style

• Known for her “searing” and “ballistic” playing style

• Electrifying performances, often compared to Jimi Hendrix or Pete Townshend

• One of her trademarks was playing her guitar behind her head

• “My style is real Lightnin’ Hopkins lowdown blues. I call it hard classic blues, stompin’ blues, railroad smokin’ blues.”

Why she’s important

• One of the first women to gain recognition as a lead blues guitarist

• A cultural trailblazer, she overcame significant gender barriers in a male-dominated industry

• Legacy as a fiery virtuoso

Watch Beverly “Guitar” Watkins play guitar

See her famous behind-the-head guitar playing live

Read more

This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

Enjoying the series? Support here to keep the good stuff coming 😊

• 6 min read •

I finished interviewing a former military officer and opted to take the subway back home. I usually got around Buenos Aires by bus.

My time in the Argentine capital was nearing its end. Every day felt more of a reminder of the precious, limited hours, the weight of crossed-out calendar pages pressing against my chest. I darted into the subway car just as the doors were closing and sat down.

A busker passed me, setting up his small portable speaker before strumming his guitar. (Fuck me if he’s about to play cumbias.) I was busy trying to figure out how to make the hands on my watch turn back.

He began to play. I recognized it immediately. My heart clenched and my skin tightened. He began to sing and I started to, quietly, lose it. I don’t think he expected this reaction but there was no stopping this show.

I got off at the next station. I had no cash.

⁂

Rock and roll — rocanrol — first came to me in the form of compact discs and MTV. I was living in Monterrey, Mexico at the time, a city known for its industrial vigor 224 kilometers from Laredo, Texas.

Looking back now, growing up in a city so unfortunately close to the American empire in the heydays of neoliberalism made it seem so normal that living in a place so similar to any random city in the US was something to aspire to. It wasn’t. But this manufactured yearning seeped into the culture. While many musical genres swept Monterrey, I developed a fascination for rock and roll and I increasingly wondered if this was something that could only be expressed in the English language.

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I can’t tell you when I first heard “Persiana Americana” (American Shutter, as in a window) but I know where I first felt the power of Rock en tu Idioma. This was an album released in the late 1980s that was a collection and most importantly a tribute to the who’s who of Latin American rock.

I was in the back seat of my mother’s Volkswagen Pointer in the underground parking lot of the Plaza La Silla Mall when the track by Enanitos Verdes, Green Dwarves, came on. I was spellbound.

This was rocanrol in a different flavor. Homemade. There were no mondegreens for me this time, I could understand every word in my native tongue. (I severely need subtitles. For years, I thought Duran Duran was singing “If they don’t kiss, there’s always me,” rather than “That fiery kiss, is all we need” in “A View to a Kill.”)

Rock latino carried the weight of an entire continent’s sociopolitical history. Created, forged, built in an environment with ever present conservative and traditional structures, concocted during the years, if not decades of brutally repressive governments.

Rocanrol was different. It stung, it was hopeful. It was unapologetically not nostalgic but rather forward-looking, toward a better tomorrow.

“Persiana Americana” was an anthem during our cross country road trips through Mexico. Its drum-filled introduction heightened my heartbeat and made me, not even a teenager then, think about the Mexico my parents had lived through. I wondered and asked them what it was like growing up in a Mexico City that wasn’t as full, as packed. Back when Iztapalapa, the most populated borough in the city, still felt green.

Listening to Soda Stereo while gazing at the stars from the back seat of the car on our drives from Monterrey to my birth town of Mexico City — a place I’ve never actually lived in — made the continent, countries, and people south of Mexico feel like they were long-lost relatives.

“We make up one single mestizo race that from Mexico down to the Strait of Magellan presents notable ethnographic similarities,” a famous Argentine explorer once said.

I left Mexico before I turned 10 when my mother got a job as a teacher in suburban Houston.

As a preteen and teen, I felt it was corny to like the music from your parents’ era. Despite this, I displayed my love for ’80s songs to my friends, but I only showed my favorite Latin American rock songs to a select few. None understood. Both linguistically and in a larger sense.

The only time I would hear some of these songs would be at parties my parents would drag my sister and me to, where it was nice, for a brief time, to be alongside people who got it, who knew the words, whose memories came alive again. Once, when I was a local journalist in Connecticut, I heard Soda Stereo blasting from a mechanic shop. I smiled, unable to actually see the person playing it.

What was supposed to be a one-year adventure in Los United Estates turned out to be two, three, ten. My sister and I spoke Spanish at home — my mother made sure of that — but on our trips to Mexico I noticed that I was falling behind on the day-to-day slang, that my friends noticed the changes in my dialect, that my Spanish was different. A distance began to form, a life that had previously been mine seemed to slip through my small fingers.

I was embarrassed that I didn’t know the words to several classic mariachi songs or other folk songs. And just when I’d been back home for long enough to feel myself finally able to latch on to those pulsing, vibrant roots, I’d be ripped back out to return to that other home north of the border.

I felt like I was losing my mexicanidad, my Mexicanness, despite genuine attempts at being as “Mexican” as I could in a different country.

In 2015, I spent a summer studying in Paris, relishing being a Latino in Europe, but at some point I realized that Latin America had always — always — been an option. For my study abroad semester in my third year of undergrad, I instinctively picked Buenos Aires. It was a no-brainer.

I knew that choice had been made years ago, in the underground parking lot of a Monterrey mall.

My seven months in Buenos Aires was the longest continuous time I’d been in Latin America since I had first left Mexico in 2003. Despertaba en español, soñaba en español, sonreía en español. Unconsciously, I ended up interviewing former military officers who were active during the Argentine Dirty War of the late 1970s and 1980s. The words from all these songs, from these rocanrol albums, had guided me there, had been, for years.

Returning to the United States felt like being forcibly awakened from a dream you never wanted to leave. Those uninterrupted months suddenly reached an end, but no closure. Flying away from the Buenos Aires airport crushed a small part of my soul.

I was haunted by a life I had only just tasted, but never lived. I thought of all the cousins I’d lost touch with, the swim meets I never competed in, the freedom I never experienced during my time in suburban America. The youth in Mexico, Argentina, in all of Latin America always seemed to live much freer lives than most anyone in suburban America. I don’t have specific studies to cite for this but I feel it in my core. Libertad, libertad.

“Persiana” defined, for a very long time, nostalgia to me. A time I never lived in, a future I’m nervous to think about, the loves (real and imagined) I never got to express myself with in my native language. For months after Buenos Aires I couldn’t listen to “Persiana,” my heart couldn’t handle it.

I took the subway the day I got back to Boston. No Soda Stereo, but I had a few dollars on me.

Just in case. ◆

About Humberto

Humberto J. Rocha is a full-time journalist living in London. He writes about carbon trading, biodiversity restoration and misses reporting on local news and community affairs. Growing up between Mexico City and Houston, Humberto freelances for Latin American outlets and tries to go to the cinema once a week.

Website www.humbertojrocha.com

Instagram @humjrocha

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• 4 min read •

I’m usually trying to get somewhere else, but I’m not sure where I learned this desire. My maternal grandmother recently reminded me that she has resided in our small hometown for all eighty-six years of her life. It moves me to hear about people who are rooted where they are. I feel disoriented by stability, and I’m not sure that this is an attractive trait. What anchors my urge to flee is that other people — and places, and things — are spindles, altering images of ourselves. This is why Karen O’s “Rapt” (2014), an elliptical song the Korean-American musician says she wrote “about someone who became a habit that was hard to kick” still influences me at twenty-three — about a decade from when I first heard the song.

I discovered “Rapt” in junior high while listening to a selection of music videos curated for the cable channel MTV. I spent my mornings before school laying on my side in fits of languidity, negotiating how the visual and sonic space created in my bedroom lengthened the amount of time I could spend avoiding the school bus. It felt like “Rapt” arrived through a dream: Karen O has an ethereal voice, and the video takes place underwater, where she considers her relativity to an exceptionally bright, circular light. Karen, in a sequined red dress, wades through the water as though it is familiar to her, although this light clearly overwhelms the scene. Those of us who like to flee need certain conduits, and there is a sense here that she has a desire to be entirely transported to and embraced by this light. She becomes a mess of lustre, the sequins on her dress catching and throwing the light back.

As someone who dabbles in the borderline and obsessive-compulsive arts, I’m not normal about interpersonal relationships. Before and after I encountered “Rapt,” I was bullied, which I’m embarrassed to say still impacts how I connect with other people. The kindest things I heard from people I crushed on when I was younger were things like “you’re not even an ugly girl” and “you’re beautiful in your own way,” and in conflict with other girls, if my docility slipped, the undercurrent of their withheld perception of me — as ugly, as fat, as poor — emerged.

As much as the image makes me laugh now, I would listen to “Rapt” on the way to and from school through my Walmart earbuds with my head against the murky school bus window. In high school and college, I remained hypervigilant but nonetheless hungry for connection. Somewhere in this time, I became overindulgent as a maladaptive solvent to loneliness. I fostered any and every relationship because people, like substances, can take you oh-so high when you’re oh-so low.

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When you learn to measure your self-perception through other people’s observations, you develop into more of a Möbius strip than someone well-rounded in social situations. I can only be too far away or too close to the people I want in my life, because I idealize everyone. Like Karen O says in the song, “love is soft, love’s a fucking bitch.” I have a poor metric for registering how other people feel about me, but when I’m loved, I’m warm and transformed.

What I love most about “Rapt” is that the phantasmagoria of abandoning oneself for another is so plainly stated, this condition of using another person to escape and defy material reality. It’s is the kind of song I would have awkwardly performed at a talent show in high school, and I admire that it reminds me of a time when yearning was alive and well. It’s not a song about character or compatibility, but the abstract nature of limerence, a recognition of the distance between the literal health of a relationship and the instinct to continue on with it as a habit instead of a conscious resolution.

Karen O told Michelle Zauner, the lead vocalist of Japanese Breakfast, in an interview that she is well acquainted with impermanence. I feel lucky to have discovered her in the era before mass music streaming completely changed how we find and connect with music, because I’m not sure if I could have managed the fragmentation I felt internally in junior high without the early influence of “Rapt” in my life. It felt nice to know that there was someone else, with much more experience than me, floating around in a sea of confusion and grasping at elusivity because of how badly she wanted someone, something, or someplace to absorb her, even if it was bad for her.

Even with a partner and two cats, I’m still learning how to reserve a fraction of the obsession I expel externally for myself. ◆

About Sade

Sade Collier is a writer and works in publishing. She lives in South Brooklyn with her partner, two cats, and a whole lot of books.

Instagram @sadeslittlediary

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Happy Valentine’s Day!

Read all the essays in the Romance category 💘

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Sweet Treats Playlist 🍫🍭🧁

Satisfy your sweet tooth. Listen→

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Music changes food

Since February is arguably the sweetest, as in sugary-est, month, I’ve had dessert on the mind. And in the last few days, I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of neurogastronomy — the science of how our senses shape taste. Turns out music can make a big difference.

“Research shows that what we hear can meaningfully influence how we perceive food…”

Basically, flavor is something we create in our brains, not something that comes from the food itself. We do this by interpreting chemical signals from our noses, ears, mouths, etc.

So whatever we’re hearing can actually shape how we taste our food. This is sometimes called “sonic seasoning” and I find it absolutely fascinating.

Maybe that’s why pairing food with music makes so much sense. It’s a sensory match made in heaven.

Dessert loves music. And musicians love dessert back.

Stevie Wonder and Eric Clapton are both known for having a big sweet tooth, Beyoncé adores peanut butter treats, Lady Gaga is especially fond of gummies, and Slash loves chocolate.

Plus, everyone from David Crosby to Dolly Parton have gushed about their love of baking.

So before we get to this month’s Sweet Treats playlist (below), I thought it would be fun to share a baking-loving musician’s recipe — for Valentine’s Day, or any day 👩‍🍳❤️

It just so happens to be her all-time favorite dessert…

Dolly’s Banana Puddin’ Cake

Prep time: 5 to 7 minutes
Cooking time: about 30 minutes
Serves: 10-12

Cake Ingredients:

• 2 boxes (12 oz.) vanilla wafers 🥮

• 6 large bananas, sliced 🍌

• 1 ½ cups sugar 🍬

• 3⁄4 cup all-purpose flour 🌾

• 6 egg yolks 🟠

• 3 whole eggs 🥚

• ½ cup butter 🧈

• Dash salt 🧂

• 6 cups milk 🥛

• 2 teaspoons vanilla🍦

Steps:

1. In a large baking pan, layer sliced bananas and vanilla wafers

2. Mix together sugar, flour, egg yolks and whole eggs, butter and salt in a heavy-bottomed saucepan

3. Add the milk, a little at a time

4. Cook slowly until the mixture thickens, about 20 minutes

5. Let mixture cool for a few minutes, then add vanilla

6. Pour over bananas and vanilla wafers

Meringue Topping ingredients:

• 6 egg whites 🥚

• 1 teaspoon lemon juice 🍋

• 1 teaspoon sugar 🍬

• 1 teaspoon vanilla 🍦

Steps:

1. Beat the egg whites with lemon juice, sugar and vanilla until stiff

2. Spoon this mixture over the top of the pudding

3. Brown at 350 degrees for 10-12 minutes or until golden on top

Back to the music

Sweet Treats Playlist 🍫🍭🧁

I made you a playlist of my favorite songs about all things sweet. Featuring songs about ring pops, cheesecake, maple fudge, churros, and more…

From the kitschy (Warrant’s “Cherry Pie”) to the unexpected (Kim Gordon’s “The Candy House”) to the nostalgic (The Archies’ “Sugar Sugar”), this playlist covers all the bases.

Recommended listening: play while baking or nibbling on something sugary and delectable 😋

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This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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• 5 min read •

Just last night, I was reminded of just how bad it had gotten and just how sick I had become.

When I was 15, I fell in love with the local undertaker’s 16-year-old daughter, Jessica. How could I not? A beautiful dark-haired girl who had recently lost her mother — who was, let’s face it, one traffic accident or terminal diagnosis away from being an orphan — and whose father worked with dead people? Please. She was also quiet and mysterious and so much more mature than the one-year gap in our ages would seem to indicate. Although by that time I had already had several short-lived crushes, this was the first time that I was so simultaneously elated and wretched when I thought about a girl. I was sick, with a painful knot in my stomach that felt like something physical, and I was sure that Jessica was the only person in the world who could cure me of this illness.

And she was completely indifferent to me. Oh, she was kind and let me walk her home a couple of times, inviting me in to listen to tapes until kicking me out before her father got home, but there was no sign that she felt the same devotion that I did for her. Without coming right out and saying it, Jessica made clear that there was no way that the two of us were ever going to happen, due to our age difference if nothing else. I was miserable about the cosmic injustice of it all, but I had no words to express what I was feeling, to her or even to myself. All that would soon change, though.

But it could change with this relationship, de-derange, we’ve all been through some shit.

High school, among its other mortifications, brought with it an interminable bus ride every afternoon, time spent commiserating with friends about our miserable suburban existence. One of them was Ted, a punk with an abusive asshole of a stepfather who did everything he could to make the kid’s life a living hell. That day on the bus, Ted was unusually preoccupied with his Sanyo Walkman. When I asked if I could hear what he was listening to, he initially refused, telling me that it wasn’t for me and that I wouldn’t like it.

His protests only made me want to hear it more, of course, so I argued with him for a good five minutes before he finally gave in. “Fine,” he said, and shoved the headphones at me, watching nervously as I put them on and pressed play. Whatever dark metal screamfest I had expected left me unprepared for what I did hear: an urgent acoustic guitar, joined moments later by a plaintive, slightly adenoidal singer who had apparently looked deep into my soul and decided to set what he’d found there to music: “I need someone, a person to talk to / Someone who’d care to love / Could it be you? / Could it be you?”

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When we grow old, it is wonderful to think about being young, remembering only the pleasure of pain-free bodies and unwrinkled faces not yet etched by age and worry. It is much less wonderful to actually be young, to feel lonely and afraid much of the time and to have no idea when or even if these feelings will ever go away. A completely self-confident adolescent would be a monster. Thankfully, no matter how convincing a façade we adopted, most of us felt just as alienated and rejected as this singer: “You can all just kiss off into the air / Behind my back, I can see them stare / They’ll hurt me bad, but I won’t mind / They’ll hurt me bad, they do it all the time.”

When I took off the headphones, Ted regarded me nervously, afraid, I think, that I was going to mock him. Instead, I blurted out, “This is awesome!” and we spent the rest of the bus ride trading the headphones back and forth, Ted promising to loan me the tape so I could copy it that night on my brother’s boombox. Weird band name aside, I was hooked. I had never heard anything quite like this before, never heard my own inchoate hopes and fears and insecurities so clearly articulated.

Third verse, same as the first.

The pain I felt over my unrequited crush did not disappear immediately (that took a few weeks), but at least now I had a soundtrack for it, a vocabulary that allowed me to emotionally articulate myself to myself. Yes, I thought, That’s what I’m feeling — that’s exactly what it’s like. Nor was it only a metaphor that the first Violent Femmes album was the soundtrack to my heartache: when I rode my bike past Jessica’s house one dark October evening (hoping to catch a glimpse of her but really just wanting to be near to where she was), I listened to “Kiss Off” on my own knockoff Walkman just to twist the emotional knife a little deeper.

I am no longer the romantic obsessive I was in the fall of 1989. The ardent passion I experienced at 15 could not sustain itself for long — not for me and not even for the Violent Femmes, those peerless chroniclers of adolescent alienation and infatuation, whose next album, Hallowed Ground, led off with a song about a grown man murdering his own child by throwing her down a well. Maybe there’s a 15-year-old out there for whom “Country Death Song” resonates as much as “Kiss Off” did for me, but if so, I sure hope I never meet him.

To this day, whenever I’m tempted to romanticize adolescence, all I have to do is listen to that song to remind myself of a time when everything I was feeling — love, heartbreak, and everything in between — I was feeling for the first time, and to remember just how lonely and excruciating an experience that can be. ◆

About Christopher

Christopher Hartley is an amateur musician and professional writing instructor, teaching social work graduate students in East Harlem. He lives in the suburban wilds of Connecticut with his partner, Ingrid, who is not an undertaker’s daughter but is pretty awesome anyway.

Instagram @hartley1

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Terri C. Smith (No. 116)

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This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

Enjoying the series? Support here to keep the good stuff coming 😊

• 4 min read •

My hands were cold as I scrolled on my phone, clutching groceries in my left hand while the J train jolted through the January air. I looked up to watch the buildings pass by on the Williamsburg Bridge when Spotify autoplayed a song I’d heard before but couldn’t quite place. It scratched my brain in the best way possible, a soft organ building and bringing a sense of calm that made me feel like I was floating. Before I could check what song was playing, I heard, “I’m going back to 505.”

It had been a minute since I last heard an Arctic Monkeys song. Back in high school, I went through an alternative/indie phase. It was 2013, their album AM had just dropped, and “Do I Wanna Know?” was everywhere. I spent far too much time on Tumblr, discovering softcore porn and wishing I could live what would later be called the Indie Sleaze lifestyle. The only thing I wanted was a pair of American Apparel Disco Shorts that my mom refused to buy me. Then, as it so often happens with 14-year-olds, I started making new friends, and my taste in music shifted. I traded indie rock for pop, deleted Tumblr, and never thought about the Arctic Monkeys again until that cold January day in 2023.

I listened to “505” on repeat until I barged through my apartment door. I immediately asked my best friend if she remembered the song, and we ended up watching old music videos from the AM era for the rest of the evening.

That night, I thought to myself, Is this what it feels like to be loved by someone? To be longed for? As someone who had never been in a real relationship, just a string of flings, I wished I had a romantic relationship I could look back on with such nostalgia. I wished for a man who would “crumble completely when I cried.” I wished for someone who would yearn for me. But then I realized the song could mean whatever I wanted it to. It didn’t have to represent a past relationship I could return to. To me, “505” became a perfect memory suspended in time, a place I could visit whenever I wanted.

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On a 7-hour flight to L.A., I decided it was time to listen to the entire Arctic Monkeys discography. After each album, I’d write down my favorite tracks in my diary, aka the Notes app. I loved hearing how their sound evolved, from sticky bar floor anthems like “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor” to the chill, jazzy vibes of “Star Treatment.” There’s truly something for everyone. This experience changed the way I listen to music. Before, I’d just listen to songs, not albums, relying heavily on playlists and algorithms to tell me what to listen to. Now, I listen to full albums, so I don’t miss the deeper story.

I had rediscovered my love for the Arctic Monkeys at the perfect time. They had just released their seventh studio album, The Car, and they were touring again. I looked on Ticketmaster, and, of course, only resale tickets upwards of $400 were left. But fate was on my side. Over the summer, I made a new friend, and we bonded over our love for the band. She had tickets to the show, and I mentioned how much I wanted to go but couldn’t justify those resale prices. A couple of weeks later, she texted to say one of her friends couldn’t make it, and she would sell me her general admission ticket for face value. I don’t think I’ve ever Venmoed someone faster. I went to the Night 1 show at Forest Hills Stadium with a group of new friends, and it was truly amazing. To this day, we’re all still friends, and I’m so thankful that “505” serendipitously brought me this wonderful group of women.

Some gatekeep-y Arctic Monkeys fans might say, “You’re not a real fan if ‘505’ is your favorite song,” but to that I say, who the fuck cares? “505” is a TikTok song now, but I always smile when I see an OOTD video using it. TikTok has brought the band to a new generation of fans, and I absolutely love that. They keep the music alive through sped-up, slowed-down, and remixed versions. And gatekeeping a band with 52.4 million monthly listeners is oxymoronic.

“505” became my comfort song in 2023. I ended up playing it 675 times that year, according to my Spotify Wrapped. When my work team had our annual “Guess the Spotify Wrapped” happy hour, they were shocked that anyone would listen to a song that many times.

Even now, I listen to it once a day. I crave it. It’s cathartic and helps me forget about the stress of daily life for 4 minutes and 13 seconds.

It’s a part of who I am. ◆

About Melis

Melis Tuman is a chronically online social media manager. When she’s not getting paid to scroll through TikTok you can find her walking around Brooklyn listening to music with an iced latte in hand or hanging out with friends.

Instagram @melistuman

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Gaby Muiño (No. 090)

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My first in 20 years

I broke my toe the other day. One of the little guys.

The good news is that it’s my first broken bone in twenty years. An accomplishment! The bad news is I can barely walk.

I’m forced to slow down, to be careful. Normal things like taking a shower or putting on shoes now go half speed. Life in slow motion is disorienting.

But I don’t…

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This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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• 4 min read •

Music was in my bones from the beginning. I was raised in rhythm. From Tramaine Hawkins to Jim Reeves, my family’s house always had melodies floating through it. Music, especially gospel, was everywhere.

At church, I sang in the Sunday school choir, and my family was popular in the local Christian community. On weekdays, though, I struggled to navigate the playground hierarchy at Furness Primary School. I wasn’t athletic, overly charismatic, or light-skinned. I had a way with words that impressed teachers but sometimes annoyed peers.

Even at 11, I was becoming aware of things about my body, status, the world. In the thick of confusing emotions, I noticed the invisible rules of masculinity that dictated who walked tall in the canteen and who faded into obscurity when the bell rang. I felt caught in a strange middle space: too young to understand, old enough to feel the weight. I was desperate to find something to boost my confidence, help me stand out or not shrink away.

Then one Saturday morning in March 1992, it happened. I was sitting cross-legged in front of the TV, half-awake, watching The Chart Show on ITV, when THAT video came on. Two kids in oversized backwards clothes with so much energy jumped onto the screen. “Jump” by Kris Kross changed everything. Produced by Jermaine Dupri with a sample of “I Want You Back” by The Jackson 5, the track had a playful yet hard-hitting beat. The video shows the duo “bouncing” in several locations, rocking to the rhythm. The call-and-response hook and confident lyrics captured teen rebellion. Years later, I learned that the opening line — “Don’t try to compare us to another bad little fad” — was a shot at fellow kiddie-rap group Another Bad Creation.

I was frozen, trying to process what I was seeing, hearing, and feeling. I could relate because they looked like people I knew. I saw glimpses of myself in them. They were my age and both named Christopher — Christopher Kelly and Christopher Smith. More than that, they were having fun and commanding the screen. They looked like they belonged. And I thought, maybe I could, too.

It was the first time I realised I could be part of Hip Hop. Until then, it felt like something I could only watch from afar — something grown men did in New York or L.A., not something a boy from Kensal Rise could step into. But Kris Kross shattered that illusion. They weren’t just doing Hip Hop. They were Hip Hop. And they were kids.

That moment didn’t just inspire me. It gave me permission to dream; to try, and to participate rather than just admire. I didn’t have to wait. I didn’t need a cosign. I just needed to start. So I did.

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I began writing but quickly found out rapping is HARD. I bought the Jump single on cassette and rinsed it on my Walkman. I practised Kris Kross’s flows when no one was around, mimicking their cadence and style, not to copy them, but to find my version of it. I wanted to impress my school friends and get my social currency up. But mostly, I wanted to prove to myself I could create something.

My first bars were clumsy, awkward lines scribbled in the back of school notebooks. I still remember my very first rap. I’ve never shared it publicly until now:

My name is MC Chris, and I’m on the mic

School is hype, and that’s what I like

There’s Maths, there’s English and History

How can I forget Geography?

Honestly, I wasn’t very good. My voice was weak. My punchlines didn’t land. I didn’t tell anyone I was rapping, but I kept writing because there was something healing in the process. Even when the words didn’t quite fit — like me in the playground — writing helped me make sense of everything I was feeling. Eventually, my lines became verses, then songs. With each one, I got better. Fragments of my soul revealed themselves between syllables.

I didn’t tell my family. Not for years. Hip Hop felt too far from the world of hymnals and devotionals they knew. I didn’t want to disappoint them or be misunderstood. So I kept it quiet. One person I did tell was my friend, Shaun Etienne. When he heard me rap, he did the “gunfinger” in approval and told me to keep going. Moments like that let me know people believed in me.

Over time, the boy who didn’t think he had much to offer became a man with something to say. That one song, “Jump,” lit a fuse that’s never gone out. The final Kris Kross album, Young, Rich & Dangerous (my favourite), was released in 1996. Christopher Kelly died of a drug overdose in 2013. I’m still a Kris Kross fan to this day.

Now, I’m a musician with hundreds of writing credits, dozens of releases, and music featured in TV shows. I’ve also forged a new career as an Audio Producer and Co-Host of Breaking Atoms, a podcast that explores the stories and people behind Hip Hop culture. It took 30 years to get here, but I’ll never forget how it started — with two kids on TV who looked like me, showing me I didn’t have to wait for permission. I could jump in, figure it out, and find my voice and place.

I’ve been jumping into new opportunities ever since. ◆

About Chris

Chris Mitchell is an award-winning Executive Producer, Writer and Musician from North West London who loves sound and storytelling. His work as an Audio Producer includes credits for BBC Sounds, 5 Live, Radio 2 and Spotify’s Sound Up UK programme. As an independent artist, Chris’ music has been featured by global brands such as ESPN, Hennessy, McDonald’s, WWE, and VICELAND. In June 2025, Chris won the The Whickers Podcast Pitch at the Sheffield Doc Fest for his narrative audio series, Redemption Man.

Instagram @iamkinetik

Substack Actual Facts: The Hip Hop Newsletter

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This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

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• 5 min read •

I was 19 years old and had just dropped out of one of the most prestigious art conservatories in the country. I clearly wasn’t doing well. Between the drug use that came with art school and the mental instability I felt as my environment shifted, I needed to leave.

The year prior was my second year in college and I had been experiencing a long version of my first romantic heartbreak. My ex was a fan of Sufjan Stevens, so I started looking into his discography. I knew a few songs already, but then I came across the over 20-minute masterpiece that is “Impossible Soul.”

I would listen to it while taking walks, I would listen to it to help me fall asleep, and I would listen to it while smoking marijuana. The trajectory of the different parts of the song changed my brain chemistry. I felt like I deeply understood the lyrics — beginning with the first part, all about a love interest who has hurt and tortured you:

Woman, tell me what you want and I’ll calm down

Without bleeding out with a broken heart that you stabbed for an hour

Followed later by:

Seems I got it wrong

I was chasing after something that was gone

To the black of night

Now I know it’s not what I wanted at all

I listened through the whole of the song what felt like a million times. However, sometimes my depression got so bad I would just listen to the first four minutes on repeat, because ultimately that was my favorite part.

After leaving college I was living with my mom and my sister who had recently graduated from the same program I had just dropped out of. And I couldn’t stop smoking. I would smoke weed from morning to night every day.

One night I couldn’t fall asleep, so I went looking for a sleep aid. I found a bottle of Advil PM, took three, and then did not sleep for many days. At one point I found myself in the bathtub at probably three in the morning singing “Impossible Soul.” I sang every lyric of that song while taking that bath, and then I got out, threw up, and got dressed. Later, the part of the song where it sounds like Sufjan is angry at God was stuck in my head:

Stupid man in the window, I couldn’t be at rest

All my delight, all that mattered, I couldn’t be at rest

And I began gathering things to give to friends and family, because in that moment, I thought I was dying.

I had developed psychosis.

My family took me to the emergency room, where I was admitted to the psychiatric ward, and I kept singing that song. In fact, more than singing, I was performing it for the whole open ward. I spent about 18 days there, with a good chunk of that time being spent in the closed unit, where the difficult patients go.

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After many delusions revolving around Sufjan Stevens himself and believing I was the reincarnated version of the girl from his song “Casimir Pulaski Day,” my mom pulled me out of the hospital because it was no longer helping. Instead it was harming me, and it seemed like there was no end was in sight. I got on large doses of many different medications and over the course of three months I got better.

On my 20th birthday, in a period of recovery, my sister did the kindest thing she could think of. She bought us tickets to go see Sufjan Stevens live at the Hollywood Bowl. It was the Carrie and Lowell tour, and I had purchased that album on vinyl the day it was released, before I got sick. The next month we went to the show. I had my doubts that he would play “Impossible Soul,” because it was from The Age of Adz and I don’t think it’s really one of his more popular songs. But to me, it’s his magnum opus.

Towards the end of the show, I heard the chord that I knew meant he was going to play “Impossible Soul,” and I felt a bittersweet joy. From my seat in the nosebleeds, I quietly sang along until the most cheerful portion of the whole song began and my sister convinced me to stand and dance while everyone else was seated:

It’s a long life, better pinch yourself

Put your face together, better get it right

Together, we sang along and danced in a sea of seated of people, and in that moment I truly understood:

It’s not so impossible

It was very clear that we were the only people in our section who really knew this song, but the deep meaning it held for both of us made this moment so special. For me, it was a full circle moment. For her, it was a glimpse at her little sister healing. Near the end of this part people began standing, but it was too late. Sufjan chose not to play the final, reflective part of the song, ending it on a high note instead.

After that night, I don’t think I ever felt the consistent urge to listen to that long, beautiful song again. And after a few years of ups and downs, I found my way. Occasionally I get nostalgic and put the song back on, but it’s very rare. Sufjan remains one of my all-time favorite artists, but I don’t really feel the need to listen to his music anymore. He is a genius, but I cannot confront the darkness his music holds. Not now that I am healthy, happy, and more than 10 years past my introduction to this song that changed me forever. Every now and then, though, I remind myself of the most important takeaway:

In the right life

It’s a miracle

Possibilities!

…

It’s not so impossible!

◆

About Maxine

Maxine Mitsuko is a former actor, developing writer, recovering Schizoaffective, and 15-year astrology student. She is new to Substack and does many different kinds of astrology readings. Find her at Algebraic Personality Poetry.

Instagram @algebraic_personality_poetry

This Song Changed My Life is open to submissions. For consideration, please fill out this simple form.

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It’s a habit

I usually don’t listen to contemporary music, mostly out of habit. Even when I was a kid, I opted for whatever my mom listened to — The Eagles and Joni Mitchell — instead of Christina Aguilera or Justin Timberlake (I once had a classmate print lyrics to a Black Eyed Peas song for me to take home and memorize so I could fit in better with my peers).

Most of the time I listen to anything from the 60s, 70s & 80s — the classics, the artists that have already made a big impact on culture. Since I didn’t live through that era, I always feel like I have a lot of catching up to do.

But sometimes I get curious. I pop out of my Stevie Nicks daydream and into reality, craving something new, something rooted in the present.

If you’re anything like me, contemporary music can feel like a vast sea of options. Where do I dive in? There’s so much new music constantly being released that it can feel overwhelming to find something to grab onto.

This list is designed to help. I’ve rounded up ten of the most talented, highly-anticipated new artists and no matter what genre of music you’re into, you’ll be able to find something to enjoy.

All of these artists are people whose music I will definitely be listening to this year. I hope you’ll join me!

There’s a playlist at the bottom of this post 🎧

Alternative Pop

1. Mikayla Geier

If you like:

❤️ Sabrina Carpenter

❤️ Lily Allen

❤️ Lady Gaga

❤️ MARINA

❤️ Robyn

About Mikayla:

• Canadian singer-songwriter

• Makes “Orchestral Pop Music” — genre-bending sound, think Tchaikovsky meets The Beatles

• Nostalgic and fresh at once, features impressive classical progressions

• Often discusses her multifaceted ethnicity, Chinese and German descent

• Trained as a dancer growing up, went to an elite Russian ballet academy

Spotify Mikayla Geier
Instagram @mikaylageier

Songs to check out: “ego of a man” • “piano in the sky” • “diva” • “pearl of glue”

R&B

2. Isaia Huron

If you like:

❤️ SZA

❤️ Leon Bridges

❤️ Daniel Caesar

❤️ PARTYNEXTDOOR

❤️ James Blake

About Isaia:

• Atmospheric pop-R&B

• South Carolina native praised for creating his own sound in the genre

• Themes of love and heartache, self-reflexive songwriting

• Smooth vocals, sometimes mistaken for Justin Bieber

• The son of a pastor and a choir director, his music blends his spiritual upbringing with a rebellious streak, seeking universal truths

Spotify Isaia Huron
Instagram @isaiahuron

Songs to check out: “CONCUBANIA!” • “FIDDY” • “I CHOSE YOU” • “FALLEN”

Punk/Hardcore

3. Die Spitz

If you like:

❤️ Bikini Kill

❤️ Sonic Youth

❤️ Sleater Kinney

❤️ The Runaways

❤️ Hole

About Die Spitz:

• Describe themselves as “a mayhem inciting cohort from Austin, Texas”

• Energy of early 90s grunge & alt-rock, often drawing comparisons to riot grrrl

• Blend of raw social commentary, energetic rock, and melodic hooks

• Their name means “pointed” or “sharp” in German, picked because of their sharp sound and feel

• Politically charged lyrics, critiques of American politics & systemic issues like war and apathy

Spotify Die Spitz
Instagram @diespitz

Songs to check out: “Voir Dire” • “American Porn” • “Chug” • “Monkey Song”

Read more

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This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring weekly essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created (and illustrated) by Grace Lilly.

• 4 min read •

Having a much older brother is like having a walking, talking gateway drug to cool shit. If they so choose, this third anti-parent can be the El Chapo of dealing grade-A films, books, counterculture, and music to an impressionable young mind. Gandalfian in their wisdom, Donald Duckian in their patience with irritating 9-year-olds, when they are not using you as crash-test dummy for slide tackles in the garden or undermining your parents’ worldview, they are shaping your tastes forever.

My brother is ten years older than me (and no, I wasn’t an accident — as the story goes, at least), and via osmosis from his love of all things that could sit in a crate, thrown there by Hunter S. Thompson, Alan Moore, or Frank Zappa, he set me on a lifelong path of liking what I like, doing what I do, and quite possibly thinking what I think.

Riding that memory train back through the fuzz of time, one song bounces into my mind, still bumping from the box room of my childhood home, as if blasting from the poster of the album cover on the wall.

In the ’80s we stared at stuff a lot more. As children, we were raised on striking still images that seared themselves uninvited onto our minds — VHS tape covers (Fright Night, anyone? House, Ghoulies, From Beyond), LP cover art (Remain in Light, Master of Puppets, Out of the Blue), and ZX Spectrum cases (Daley Thomson’s Decathlon, Underwurlde). They all tied themselves into our memory palette in a way that the content of the three-thousand-mile-an-hour flicky, streamy social media age never could.

Enter the early ’90s, and enter stage left an image and a song that changed my life.

Three posters on our Steve’s bedroom wall — two hanging on from the decade before.

By the window: a curling image of The Damned’s Phantasmagoria.

By the door: Echo & the Bunnymen, Ocean Rain.

Oooo and what’s this new one in the middle, freshly blu-tacked up to unintentionally bestow on me a lifelong love of hip-hop?

Black and white. A skull-shaped pipe next to a cheek. Distorted ghost smoke drifting by sealed lips.

It’s perfect.

It’s The Predator.

It’s Ice Cube.

Go on, close your eyes — if you were listening to hip-hop in ’92, the image of this album cover will be right there.

“What the bloody hell does ‘Feat.’ mean? And who are Das Eee-Ef-Ex?”

That was my dad (and secretly me) learning that rappers feature on other artists’ songs. Wonders never cease.

“Check Yo Self” was playing while I stared at The Predator poster and listened to the two men (because that’s what my bro was by then, I was 13ish he was 23ish) discussing the song he’d been asked to turn down — because the neighbour, Mr. Gibbs (unfortunately not Freddie), was trimming the edge of his front lawn with scissors and didn’t need to hear that shotgun bullets are bad for yo health.

Big Bro the Gatekeeper had swung open the door and I head-nodded in. From Da Lench Mob to Public Enemy to Snoop to Dre to ohmygod I’m getting chills just remembering getting the album off my own back, Wu Tang’s 36 Chambers. Then all bets were off, at least 30 years of hip-hop fandom.

I was Timberland-boot, baggy-jean bound as soon as Cube asked, “Das EFX in this, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Actually, most of the time, Mr. O’Shea Jackson, I didn’t know what you were sayin’ (sold it for a six-o, always let tricks know / and friends know, we got the indo… I’m sorry, what, duck?), but I’d be then spending years learning vernacular, dissecting lyrics, studying CD inlays, and sometimes *cringe siren* writing rhymes. The path sent me into London’s dungeon hip-hop clubs, freestyle nights, drinking Hennessy as Xzibit poured it into our mosh pit, and yadayadayada right up until last year as an old English unicorn standing out like a very tall, white thumb at Juvenile’s Juvie Tuesday in the Treme. Along the way, I connected with the people who are some of my best friends today. All thanks to that one song, that one seared image, and most importantly that one big bro.

Steve’s almost 55 now and still a never-ending personal public service announcement for new books to read, podcasts to check, documentaries to question, and always, always, always new music to listen to. And I’ve re-re-realised writing this, with slightly blurry eyes, that the love of all things creative is a love of life — what an incredible gift to give to an annoying little brother (in between making him sob incessantly by calling him Martian Head or Camel Teeth).

We lost our dad not too long ago, so my brother’s role as the third anti-parent has, unbeknownst to him, grown and morphed, and the time we spend together now is even more amazing than the precious pestered hours I fought for as a little ’un distracting him from teenage things to play with M.A.S.K. and He-Man toys.

I’m listening to “Check Yo Self” as I write this. Its funky West Coast swagger, inflected with some East Coast tiggedy-tongue fiddedy-flips, still sounds as fresh and important as all Ice Cube’s work did until he decided to become a Hollywood rent-a-scowl. This one song sent me on a meandering journey that opened me to issues of race, oppression, creativity born from rage, and much more. A funny thing as I listen on, as Cube viciously asserts that’s kinda trifle ’cause that’s a knife, hoe / AK-47, assault rifle, I don’t hear the violence or the anger. Instead, I am filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude for being introduced to one of the loves of my life and, most of all, a love for my big brother and appreciation for the years we still have together. ◆

About Simon

Simon Ward works in primary education and also writes books like The House That Fell Off the Cliff and the scary kids’ book The Perilous Prock. His two children do not think his rapping is cool.

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