No. 000 - The Origin Story: This Song Changed My Life
No. 000 - The Origin Story: This Song Changed My Life
How we got here — a series of events dating back to 2007
This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created by Grace Lilly, supported by readers.
• 7 min read •
I love the way music connects people. I discovered this at my first concert. I was 14 years old and had spent five long hours on a bus to New York City and another two standing in line in Times Square outside the now-defunct Nokia Theatre.
After hours of anticipation, I was trying to soak in every detail. Before the performance started, I found myself totally mesmerized by the sea of strangers surrounding me. I felt delightfully connected to them. Everyone was just as excited as I was. Whenever I’d make accidental eye contact with someone in the crowd, I smiled without thinking. They smiled back.
It occurred to me that I had something in common with all of them — we all loved the same music. For curious minds, the concert was for MIKA’s Life in Cartoon Motion “Dodgy Holiday” tour. My love of old movies made me partial to his song “Grace Kelly,” and the incidental rhyming of our names Grace Lilly/Grace Kelly was just a bonus.
I’d grown to love his music thanks to an eighth grade French exchange trip where the coolest people my little teen self had ever met — 16 year old Parisian high school students — played “Relax, Take It Easy” on repeat at every gathering and party. So naturally, MIKA felt like the coolest music in the world to me.
A few months ago I came across a picture scrolling through Instagram. It read, “If you show me good music, I will never forget you.” I loved it. It made me think of how every time I hear MIKA, I can’t help but be reminded of those French exchange students (and how I definitely had crushes on all of them 💕).
I shared the image in my stories and asked people to share their music recs with me. By the end of the day, I was down the rabbit hole listening to all the songs they’d sent. Hearing the music that they loved made me feel closer to them without even trying.
Some of my closest friendships started with music recommendations. In middle school, my friends and I would burn each other CDs of carefully-curated personal playlists. In college, I’d exchange USB sticks full of music I loved with anyone who also identified as “a music person.”
Around that time, I got interested in the ways in which music could create community. When I was 20 years old, a couple of friends and I started something called the Vinyl Project — about once a week, a group of us would gather in a little room and listen to a single vinyl record from start to finish.
The only rules were: no talking, no phones. You wouldn’t think that sitting silently in a room with people listening to the same record would make you feel connected to them, but it weirdly does.
Outside of music, the concepts of connection and community are big themes in my life. In 2017, I was feeling really lonely. Work had taken over my life and my time on social media wasn’t making me feel meaningfully connected. So as a sort of experiment, that summer I challenged myself to write one letter a day for a month.
By the end of the thirty days, I really felt like a new person. It amazed me how taking as little as 15 minutes a day to write to people vs. mindlessly scrolling Instagram changed my life.
I started researching loneliness and connection and was shocked to find out that 3 in 5 Americans feel lonely and disconnected — and this was before the pandemic made it even worse. What freaked me out the most was how bad loneliness is for your health. I had no idea that it’s as dangerous to your body as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
I was alarmed and wanted to do something to help. So I started my small business, Nice Paper Goods, to give people a practical way to help them feel more meaningfully connected.
I’ve spent the last year growing a community of people on Instagram around that project, and I’m always interested in finding new ways to make those who follow it feel more connected to one another.
Previously, I created a few playlists that got people dancing to the same tunes, but in April it hit me that I could reach out to them and we could create an epic community-curated playlist together.
It took a few weeks and one helluva spreadsheet, but we made a playlist with over 100 people from 15 different countries. Listen on Spotify or below (it’s really damn good).
The best part? People’s responses. I was blown away with how many messages and comments we got from people saying how much closer they felt to the other people who follow @nicepapergoods thanks to the playlist.
I had hoped that this would happen, but wasn’t sure if it was possible to foster an actual sense of genuine community on a platform like Instagram. I was (and still am) thrilled. I wanted to keep the momentum going and continue with this exploration of the intersection between music and community.
When I was 19 years old, I ran a blog that had a section I called “This song changed my life.” I would ask friends to think of a song that changed their lives, whatever that might mean to them, and explain. It was a glorious adventure. I inevitably discovered new music that I fell in love with, and grew closer to the people who participated.
Flash forward to now: I decided it’s time to start it back up again. I want to use music as a tool to foster community. This time by sharing these accounts and creating a more intentional archive.
I’ve always thought it was fascinating how deeply personal music can feel internally. It seems like a lot of people can relate to hearing a certain song and having your whole body wake up. It’s oddly visceral and borderline uncomfortable, especially when the song holds strong meaning in your life or transports you back in time to a certain moment.
A good song can be like a good friend. It keeps us company, it goes with us everywhere (thanks to our phones). We can listen to it for days at a time, never getting bored of it. When we feel like shit, a song can feel like the only thing that helps.
It’s so powerful that I used to want to study the chemistry of the brain as affected by music. When I was in high school, I was drowning in anxiety. A lot of days, music was my only relief. I could physically feel something shift in my body when I started to listen. It felt like magic.
I believe almost everyone can relate to that. We have these songs that changed us in some way, helped us get through something bad, altered our way of thinking or experiencing, became synonymous with our most cherished memories, or just made us feel seen. Our favorite songs can reveal a lot about us.
Few highs are better than watching someone fall in love with a song you introduced them to.
My goal in this project is to introduce you to music you wouldn’t have otherwise listened to, and for you to feel connected to another human being — even if just for the duration of one song.
I hope you dig it.
About Grace Lilly
Grace Lilly is a New York City based artist who revels in the delightfully weird. As a photographer, she seeks to discover and enshrine hyper-specific, strangely beautiful moments in which the anomalous feels relatable. She also loves writing letters and runs a small stationery business designed to help people feel less lonely.
Instagram @gracefullyweird
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