Music of My Life

When I was a baby, my father used to dance me to sleep, and play Beach Boys records.   At our father-daughter dance at my wedding with Gene, we danced to  Surfer Girl.  This song will always be "our" song.  It was a solid month after Dad's untimely death in 2008 before I could listen to ANY music again, much less the Beach Boys.

Now I can listen to them again, with joy.  And just maybe someday, I'll catch a wave!
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As a teenager in the 1980s, I listened to the predictable stuff---Journey, Styx, Toto, Foreigner---but unlike most of my group of friends, I started getting into something called New Wave.   I remember listening to "college radio" and reading Rolling Stone, and realizing my little world at IFHS was about to expand. 
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However, when it came to choosing a first dance with Gene at our wedding, we did go back to an "old" Foreigner tune:  Our Wedding Dance
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In college grunge rock came onto the scene and I will always associate bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Live, etc with those days.  Flannel, Birkenstocks, hackysack and incense....memories!  

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~If you took a look at our CD rack/iTune lists today, you would see music all over the map.  I love little bits of everything, from jazz to country, hip hop to classical, rap to ambient.  My main genre of choice is probably 70s rock, though.  I'm always seeking out new bands from every genre.  One of my favorite ways of doing this is to listen to sampler CDs from Amazon or to download the monthly sampler from Utne Reader magazine. 
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When I was deep in depression, these two songs resonated painfully:
 Flood and Drowning Man
(Yeah, I get the water theme.)
I would listen to these songs over and over and just sob uncontrollably.

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And, thankfully, depression lifted, and I'm dancing once again, and singing...

Someone once posed the question to me, would I rather be blind or deaf?  And honestly, I think I would chose to be blind.  Music means so much to me, I don't think I'd want a life without it.