Over the last thirty-three years, I have had very few sit atop those mountains, which I find curious for a multitude of reasons. Am I that reluctant to change? Did I understand my soul at such a young age? Did I fill my head with so much nonsense early on that there wasn't room for anything better?
Perhaps the most generous answer is that I am the loyal sort, and once I find something I love, I hold onto it for all it's worth.
The History Of My Favorite Song:
Meat Loaf - I'd Do Anything For Love (1993 - 1995)
While there was music I liked before this, most notably Alannah Myles' "Black Velvet", hearing this song was the flash point at which my life changed. Music turned from something passively listened to in the car on the way to wherever into an active and passionate experience. I can't remember if I heard this on the radio first, or saw the video on VH-1 (sorry, I was always more of a VH-1 watcher than MTV - I was old when I was young), but the impact was immediate. I knew nothing about Meat Loaf, or music at all, but I was drawn into the world this song created (and no, it was not because of the actress playing the role in the video... at least not entirely). I soon acquired the cassette single, a sentence that makes me feel as old as my currently strained back, then the album. Despite all odds, I felt a kinship with Meat and Jim Steinman, the latter of which would evolve into a way for me to understand myself, and feel understood.
While its tenure as my favorite song would not last long, the impact it made has continued to echo. As I have written about many times, Steinman's voice helped me to find my own, and I would not be the person I am without having loved this song the way I did back then. So why did it not last longer?
Blues Traveler - Hook (1995 - 1999)
The answer to that question comes here, and in part because of the evolution of technology. When I made the shift from cassettes to CDs, the first one I got was Blues Traveler's "Four". That meant I listened to that record time and time again, while the albums sitting on passe tapes felt like relics for the time being. For a long stretch of time, listening to "Four" was a near daily ritual, although often it would get condensed to the 'big four' songs (the last of which would change weekly). I did not understand sarcasm and bitterness just yet, but the tongue-in-cheek nature of the lyric still came through. Add in the harmonica solo that remains my favorite solo of any instrument to this day, and it was easy to see why an impressionable youth like me would be drawn to the song, no matter how it would have been seen by the 'cool crowd'.
By the time the next album cycle started, I had already begun to show the cynicism and bitterness my classmates would be calling out in me, which gave me a deeper understanding of what "Hook" was trying to say. I applied it to a different scenario, where I was able to get through by telling people what they wanted to hear, rather than what I actually thought, but the theme of keeping up appearances (a phrase intentionally picked because I was also watching that British sitcom on PBS at the time) was one that resonated with the version of me that wanted to keep people from ever probing beyond the most perfunctory "How are you doing?" that never intended to start a conversation.
Tonic - If You Could Only See (1999 - 2013)
My mind next changed when I discovered Tonic. I heard this song come through the radio, and I wore out the opening spot on my recorded mix-tape listening back until the magnetic powder began to fail. The lamenting slide guitar echoed in my head as I mused about the meaning of melancholy, and I tried to fit my story into the lyric, which was only possible through the foolish misinterpretation of a not yet poetic youth. Tonic let me say something about myself I had not yet found the way to tell myself, and over the years I would come to find a more suitable way of inserting myself into the lyric. The situation was never the same, but the feeling of trying to convince myself and everyone else a feeling was so real most definitely was.
It was this song that inspired me to pick up a guitar, and to think about music as more than merely something we listen to and love. Music became something I made, something I identified with, something I obsessed over. Music became the way I talked about myself, the very way I came to understand the thoughts that otherwise jostled around in my head until I was lucky enough for one of them to fall through the shape of a phrase. Tonic provided me my voice, which I could not fathom would one day be replaced as the most pivotal moment in the relationship between me and music.
Dilana - Falling Apart (2013 - Today)
That would change when I heard Dilana singing this song. From the first time I heard her voice coming through the television speaker, I knew there was something special about her. I could not explain it yet, and maybe I never quite have, but if such a thing as 'love at first sound' exists, that is what it was. The love was there, but would not blossom until a few years later, when I first heard this song. The video was a blur of digital noise, and the sound clipped the microphone horribly, but even so the song spoke to me in a way only those three listed above ever had. It was telling me what the future would bring before I was ready to hear it.
I had been telling jokes about being 'broken' for years, but I thought they were merely self-deprecation. As time went on, and people's claims that things would get better never seemed to pan out, the humor was being sanded off the comments. At a certain point, Dilana's voice went from telling her story to telling our story. The reason her voice had sparked something from the very first time became clear, as this song started to explain that we were completely different and yet exactly the same. She was breaking from how the weight of the world pressed on her, while I was broken from having never been whole to start with. The feeling of being 'so bloody fucked up' was one we shared, one we have talked about as a reason we feel connected. To quote Hamlet, "Ay, there's the rub."
This song was able to overcome nearly two decades of personal inertia because of two things; my faltering relationship with making music, and the meaning of the friendship it led to. Few things in my life are truly dear to me, but Dilana is one of them. Once I say that, the rest is obvious. And I once again find myself in the position of feeling as if the truth has been etched upon me, and I may never have to update what I am saying right now.
The History Of My Favorite Album:
Meat Loaf - Bat Out Of Hell II (1993 - 1999)
This was not the first album I had on cassette, but it was the first one I listened to as an album, and not the music hanging around the one song I wanted to hear. Every time I listened through the record to avoid having to hear the screech and hiss of the tape rewinding, I heard more fragments of Jim Steinman that felt like they fit in my own personality. His sarcasm, his melodrama, his refusal to give a fuck about fitting in with anything that could be considered cool, it all felt like me before I knew anything about myself. Yes, I preferred Laurel & Hardy to The Three Stooges he referenced, but Steinman was the first person who seemed the least bit like me.
This was the first time music swept me up, and took me to a place other than what is obvious consciousness. Even today, I get a bit lost in Steinman's compositions as they rise and fall, ebb and flow, through an hour of making every little thing sound like the most important thing that has ever happened. Music didn't just become 'a' language when I discovered this album, it became 'my' language. Too much of "Life Is A Lemon And I Want My Money Back" could have come from my own mouth, if I wasn't so bent on writing in more obtuse metaphors. This album was a moment of happenstance where who I was contained just enough of who I would become for the future to reach back through time and bring me on board.
Tonic - Lemon Parade (1999 - 2022)
The first time I heard this album, I did not understand the impact it would have on me. I loved "If You Could Only See", but the rest of the songs left me feeling a bit cold, a bit unimpressed. It wasn't until the brighter and poppier "Sugar" came out three years later that I went back and realized what I had been missing. "Lemon Parade" was the album steeped in the aftertaste of grunge, which was just the right amount of angst and grit for me. Whereas "Bat Out Of Hell II" embodied my cynicism through the sarcasm and nonchalance, Tonic embodied it through the thin layer of grime on he guitars and Emerson's strident delivery. Perhaps that is why I was so inspired to pick up an instrument.
As the years wore on, I kept hearing echoes of "Lemon Parade" in my own writing. Tonic's insistent melodies were my blueprint for writing contours of notes, and Emerson's was close to the voice I heard in my head. That connection was enough to hide the truth, that "Lemon Parade" had been slipping away from me as I realized the stories Emerson was telling had little to say about me or my life. I hung on as long as I could before I could not longer deny that my love for the album was more about what it did for me than what it still did for me. I love it dearly, but in more of an archival way.
Jimmy Eat World - Futures (2022 - Today)
That brings us to today, where I am honest with myself that the one album I keep reaching for more than any other is this one. As time marched along the path from history to today, the way I see myself has changed, even if I have not. As I came to understand myself and my nature, certain things became harder to accept. Those feelings once described as bitterness solidified into a thicker molasses of depression, which would fill the blackness of my slowly fading dreams.
As I dealt with more such episodes, "Futures" was the album that spoke to me. At first that was purely sonic, with the darker guitars and plaintive vocals capturing the sound of what my head felt like. The more I reverted to that world, the more I found the stories showing me those ghosts are not unique to me, they were merely decades late in arriving. "Futures" is an album that embraces the ugliness of feeling hurt, but walks away with a sense of optimism that we are not living in the worst of timelines. When the final song ends with the declaration "don't give away the end, the one thing that's still mine", it does a better job of giving me reason to hold out a shred of hope than any of the people who try to argue everything 'happens for a reason', or is part of 'a plan'. "Futures" lets me feel as if I am not alone in the darkness, even if cannot see anyone else, let alone reach out and touch them.
That's been a needed comfort, and I don't know if it will ever stop being one. I would like to think so, but who knows?
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