Auditory Diaries
As a father of two daughters, your first responsibility is to keep them safe. Your second is to ensure they have killer music taste.
For as long as I can remember, the words “Quick, who sings this?” have accompanied every car ride I ever had with my dad growing up. Even now, as I’ve branched out and developed my own taste, it’s a fun game to play when I’m home. It’s a deal that is struck the moment a baby girl is born: Dad is subject to endless Disney princess movies and credit card swiping, and in return, his daughter needs to be able to sing along to ‘80s rock bands with him, the way God intended.
I once got extra credit from my professor because I was the only student who caught the reference to The Cure in the book we were studying. Another time I was granted an extension when I was heard singing AC/DC after class. I’ve bonded over Depeche Mode and The Smiths with wiser coworkers and have a maladaptive habit of pretending I’m in a Molly Ringwald film every time Tears for Fears comes on. Once, a pretentious ex-boyfriend asked me if I had “ever heard of this song by the Eagles.” What an idiot. I was offended, furious even. How dare he assume that I was oblivious to the Eagles, that I was guilty of the greatest of musical sins? It’s safe to say that I never went out with him again. I was lacking in dating skills, sure, but I respected myself enough to know that I deserved a man who wouldn’t assume that my musical education began and ended with whatever he thought was impressive, as if he were the first man on earth to hear “Life in the Fast Lane”. Give me a break.
Years later, I’ve noticed that so many of my most important memories are attached to certain music. My own rotation of playlists serves as auditory diaries of past relationships, travels, friends, experiences, and transformative periods of my life. I’ve also found, unfortunately, that I catch myself judging others quite hastily based on their music taste. You really can tell so much about someone—their past, their feelings, their values, likes, dislikes, politics… Music serves as a window into so many things about us, and it also bonds people together. The first time I hung out with a girl who is now one of my closest friends, she put on a Jamiroquai song, and I knew it was meant to be. Our shared playlist from high school remains one of my most-played. Music also influences our mood in how we perceive different environments, such as nightclubs, churches (big jump, right), restaurants, bars, coffee shops… This is because music isn’t just something we enjoy hearing; so many areas of our brain relish consuming it. Music causes an electric receptiveness from the hippocampus to the amygdala, the limbic system to the prefrontal cortex. Melodies link emotion, memory, and decision-making into one shared, primal experience. Since the beginning of time, it has bonded us to one another as a shared language before we even had the words to explain it. Music and dance have been a backdrop for ritual and celebration that people have always gathered around to pass on stories and culture. It is directly intertwined with what our ancestors knew to be worship and community. It has a unique way of making people feel like they belong to something.
When I go through my playlists now, I can trace each one back to a specific version of myself. There are some that I continue to evolve, and others that I’ve kept frozen in time, just as small reminders of what I was going through, who my friends were, who I had a crush on, which movie I had watched, etc. There is still love left over in the sappy songs a boy once sent me, the tracks I refuse to listen to serving as a kind of harmonic purgatory. I can still feel the wave of confidence in the songs my best friend and I would get ready to in high school, and the same adrenaline in the rap lyrics I once memorized, trying to seem cooler than I really was. Each song, each album, and each playlist holds a fragment of a moment, and all of them together tell the story of my taste in music today, and the people and experiences it came from. Sometimes, if my windows are down and the wind hits my face just right while I’m blasting my “Father’s Daughter” playlist, I can still faintly hear the words “Quick, who sings this?”.
Written by Lillian Glassmoyer, Photography: Kaleigh Mazy, Design: Juliana Negre, Social Media: Veronica Pro, Styling: Nicola Chukwuemeka, Event: Cliff Melchor