The Song That Changed My Life

Our Staff Recalls Moments in History

By Staff

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It's been said that smell is the most powerful and evocative of the senses, but I'd argue that this distinction belongs to hearing— or, more specifically, hearing a song. While a familiar scent can conjure up memories both beautiful and disturbing, a song can do this and more. A song, unlike a scent, can lodge itself into your auditory cortex and forever alter your character. "Most people die with their music still locked up inside them," said Benjamin Disraeli. The 19th century statesman might've been talking about human beings and their unfulfilled potential, but his words can also be interpreted more literally. Here are the songs that have worked themselves into our bodies and made us what we are—charming and cruel, naive and jaded, loving and bitter.

"Take Me Home Tonight"

Eddie Money

I was driving to Six Flags-Darien Lake in western New York this summer, suffering through my friend Corey's predilection for power ballads, when suddenly the opening synthesizer riff of "Take Me Home Tonight" hit the car's speakers. Corey was instantly transfixed. I didn't even recognize the song. But when it reached its triumphant chorus, I had to break a smile. Timing is critical— I was coming off a year at Brown, an ironic, hipster bubble saturated with indie rock. When Edward Mahoney and his female backing vocalist sang to me that afternoon, their infectious 80s rock somehow shattered my pretentiousness and self-awareness, opening me up to a world of unabashed enthusiasm, a world where non-threatening guys wear bomber jackets and play air guitar even when people are watching. I began to rethink Corey's taste in music. More importantly, for the rest of the summer, whenever I took my '97 Volvo for a spin, I made sure to roll down my windows, crank the stereo volume to ten, and sing along to a burned CD of "Take Me Home Tonight."

—Ben Ewing

The Sesame Street Theme Song

I vividly remember sitting on a blanket spread out on the linoleum floor of my mom's office in a Seattle hospital at age five, my eyes transfixed by the black-and-white images of Grover zooming past with his cape, of kids jumping on a trampoline, and of Big Bird waving me into the neighborhood for one blissful hour. While the show became an audiovisual security blanket, thick and soft with vivid colors and plot lines, the lyrics of the opening jingle reached me on a less conscious level. They describe a utopia where "everything's a-OK," where happy people convene to sharpen their counting skills, and where the clouds of later childhood (divorce, puberty) are continually swept away. This anthem instilled in me the value of community and an appreciation for whimsy. Its melody still has the power to rekindle that childhood naïveté, first brought to me so long ago by the number seven. "Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?" No, but I wish.

—Shane Brennan

"Arpeggiator"

Fugazi

Junior year of high school was stressful. Classes were harder than they had ever been, my weekends were devoted to militant home renovation sessions with my overworked parents, and I had a thing for this punk guy who turned out to be a total jerk. He burned me a bunch of CDs during the brief period when we were slightly more than friends, citing my need for "musical education." His gifts included London Calling, Pinkerton, Operation Ivy's Energy and Fugazi's 13 Songs and End Hits. I listened to "Arpeggiator" on repeat while studying for AP tests, lying in a hammock in my backyard while my house was being re-roofed. Although it comes from one of Fugazi's lesser-regarded records, I couldn't have cared less. My huge headphones managed to block out the sounds of construction as I managed to block out the fact that he had used me without any sense of regret. I passed all my tests and he was kicked out of our high school at the end of that year.

—Sarah Hotchkiss

"A Whole New World"

From Disney's Aladdin

Of all the Disney heroines I was obsessed with during my childhood, Princess Jasmine was the one I most wanted to emulate. I wanted her impossibly long hair, her impossibly large eyes. I wanted to wear her outfit— turquoise was my favorite color. And, above all, I wanted a boyfriend like Aladdin to sing duets with. I owned the soundtrack on cassette and listened to "A Whole New World" over and over again.

Later, when I started lusting after actual boys instead of animated ones, I discovered that I had a dangerously idealized view of love. I expected my relationships to be transcendent, to transport me to some higher realm of "unbelievable sights" and "indescribable feeling." I hold "A Whole New World" responsible. Even now, no matter how well a boy treats me, I can't help feeling disappointed that we're not "soaring, tumbling, freewheeling through an endless diamond sky." I'm afraid that as long as I'm bound by the laws of gravity, I'll never believe I'm in love.

—Alexandra de Jesus

"Recommendation"

Mirah

"I made you a mix tape," she said. "It's all girl music." We spent that summer going to $5 shows at Fitzgerald's and the Oven, before somebody burned it down, and swimming in Kevin Bloom's pool. We broke into the abandoned hotel by my house to take photographs and look for ghosts. We went on road trips to Austin, to San Antonio, to House of Pies for pancakes at 3:00 in the morning. The boy I had a crush on fell in love with her. She dated him for a week then dumped him unceremoniously, so we could make fun of him behind his back. She played her mix tape in my car and we yelled along to That Dog and Sarge, because we knew all the words. We were going to be famous. We were going to live together in New York, and neither one of us would ever get married. Once, I wrote a poem about her hair.

We stopped talking sophomore year. ("People change," she said.) The other day, I heard she'd taken leave from school and moved back home. Whenever I hear this song, I wonder what she's doing, and if she's feeling any better now.

—Sarah LaBrie

"Theme From Flood"

They Might Be Giants

In the summer of 1995, my older sister made a mix tape for me. Up until that point in my life, my musical tastes had been more or less nonexistent. The only music I listened to were the half-executed tunes that came out of the piano in my effort to master the instrument, or whatever NPR played between segments.

I don't recall why she made the tape for me, or even if it was made for me in the first place. Side A, however, was They Might Be Giants' Flood, beginning with the song "Theme From Flood." It was with this song that I began to shape a taste in music.

I no longer listen to They Might Be Giants, and there have been many bands since, but I can say that things would have turned out very differently for me if Alice had never given me that tape. I may have remained lost with undefined and unrefined musical taste, or, worse, I might have begun my modern musical life with Better Than Ezra.

—Nathan Lovejoy

"Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands"

Bob Dylan

This song remained unplayed, hanging silently off the end of Blonde on Blonde, until one particularly bleak winter week. My girlfriend and I had just decided not to live together for the summer, which sent a cascade of worries through my skull: I would not move to the Midwest. We would fall out of love. We would fall out of love. Walking through the night—too dark, too cold, too early—I pushed play and the mercury waltz of track 14 began to fill the space that the sensation of love had left. For eleven minutes, I idolized a whole new sad-eyed lady, as Dylan does, with a deep passion, respect, and, more than that, curiosity. "Your streetcar visions, which you place on the grass / And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass." All those halting images, those scary but calming words. I wondered, days of listening later, if I would ever understand this woman the way Dylan does.

—Josh Lerner

"Blue Horizon"

Sidney Bechet

One of the noblest figures to ever come out of the city that I will never see is Sidney Bechet. Bechet grew up in a nice part of New Orleans watching his father shape leather soles with his hands. By the turn of the 20th century he was playing the clarinet as if he had suffered for a hundred years.

Shortly before the turn of the following century I sat in the living room of my mother's house on Maxwell Lane, listening to the opening notes of "Blue Horizon" over and over. The feeling I got from those notes was, and is, inarticulable. I could only think, "This is how should be." The blank, I think, had something to do with the presence in that room of the man my mother would marry, the premonition of middle school and awful things to come, and most of all the house, that Maxwell house with the lime green kitchen that I knew I'd have to leave soon enough. Bechet and I both know what it's like to be nostalgic for something before you've left it.

—Claire H.O.

You Oughta Know

Alanis Morissette

I consider it one of the Fates' crueler jap es that I didn't get to be nineteen in 1979. Or, more specifically, nineteen and living in Manchester, bearing rapt witness to Ian Curtis' other-wordly jolting and gyrating. I suppose it is some small compensation, though, that I was nine when I first heard Alanis Morissette sing "You Oughta Know." It was my fifth-grade best friend's cassette. She left it at my house, and I spent the better part of an afternoon holding two boom boxes together, trying to transfer Alanis's Gen-X spewings to a blank tape. Recalling this first foray into musical piracy, I can almost feel the sugar-and-spice sublimate from my gawky pre-pubescent limbs. "Is she perverted like me?" Alanis snarled at some phantom ex-boyfriend, "Would she go down on you in a theatre?" While I had no idea what this meant, I knew that she definitely used the word "fuck" and had a cross to bear, which I could relate to, having just started middle school. Although perhaps I should be all the more resentful that the whole experience didn't take place ten years later. That way, DJ Danger Mouse could have mixed Jagged Little Pill with the Now and Then soundtrack.

—Sarah Gordon

Glenn Gould

Well-Tempered Clavier Book II

For many inveterate nerds, honing a taste for the musically obscure is a sacred right of passage, a badge of maturity and adulthood that, in their peculiar circle, garners at least as much respect as premature devirgination. For me, however, it was a complete accident. All I wanted to do was fit in. On the bus during a fifth-grade field trip, I pretended to sing the words to "The Sign" so I wouldn't be ostracized by the hipper, Samba-sporting kids when we finally reached the aquarium. In middle school I mumbled Tupac, brandishing my fingers like a nine-millimeter in the hallway, oblivious to the fact that my desire to ingratiate myself with my classmates was more irritating than endearing.

It was not until ninth grade that my slow rise to the spires of social acceptance and musical mediocrity was finally and decisively killed—in other words, I purchased my first CD, a double-album performance of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier Book II. From the first sprightly notes of the C-Major prelude to the bittersweet surliness of the closing B-Minor fugue, I found greater depth, sophistication, joy, perfection, ecstasy and despair than I had in any of my ersatz forays into popular music. It was like hearing the first words of a language I did not know I could speak. Only later did I realize that all the native speakers were dead and that my recondite love was as sure a ticket to cultural solitude as any I had fought to avoid.

—Ben Carlson

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