Having discovered Elliott Smith via a friend’s cool older brother, and after seeing him play in coffee shops, I was fully prepared to love the record. That was the image I had of my life when I was 16 years old and Elliott Smith’s Either/Or was released. I’m drunk and I haven’t a care in the world. I’m in an alley between two bars somewhere in Portland, Oregon, probably on NW 21st Street, back up against a wall, while some handsome indie rocker kisses me furiously. T he sensory memory I always associate with “Behind the Bars” by Elliott Smith is of a cool, drizzly night, the sidewalks cleaned by the rain. I hope reading these essays will inspire you to share your own song story. In this excerpt below, music writer Cortney Harding shares why Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars” set her romantic notions of adulthood and startup founder Marc Ruxin explains how The Velvet Underground’s “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’” changed his tastes. What you’ll read in Song Stories: Music That Shaped Our Identities and Changed Our Lives are thirty personal accounts of how people’s lives have been impacted by specific songs. The time had come to collect and share these stories to create a people’s history of music. Unlike old journals and diaries, this soundtrack does not collect dust on a nightstand or in the bottom of a box but is stored on a smartphone that we take everywhere and hold tightly in our hands. The soundtrack of our lives is an ongoing playlist that we add to with each new experience. For many of us, it is the closest thing we have to the journal we never wrote or the diary that has long been packed away.
We build a history of music throughout our lives that is unique to us, shaped by our tastes and life experiences. We interject our personal narrative into their songs, and it feels as though they mirror our own memories and emotions. We relate their lyrics back to the events that have happened in our lives. We recall those words, but what we remember isn’t what they meant to the person who wrote them. S ongs become a part of the story of our lives.
0 kommentar(er)
