I remember when I was thirteen years old, riding in my dad’s metallic blue Ford sedan to my orthodontic appointment. His radio was tuned to a hard-core country station playing music by George Jones, Conway Twitty, Johnny Cash. With a typical sullen teenage attitude, I rolled my eyes and pleaded with him to change the station to rock and roll. Something cool, not corny. He looked at the road ahead and simply said, “No. I like it. It stays.” I had no choice but to listen to the painful yet easily understandable lyrics about love and loss and heartache while I pouted and stared out of the side window. It was a couple of decades later when the painful lyrics and the whine of the steel guitar became emotionally relatable to me. And thus, my appreciation of country music began.
As a very young adult, I began taking ballet classes. I had always danced around the house, strutting, twisting, whirling, and twirling in any free-form style that the rhythms of rock music took me. But ballet required disciplined and precise movement, perfect form, perfect timing with each note of the classical compositions of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, or Debussy. With each class, I developed a little bit of grace and new respect for the form of music that I had previously dismissed as boring.
I continued my musical journey into classical music to listen to while I was in law school, not wanting the beat or lyrics of the usual rock and roll to distract me into singing or dancing along instead of trying to discern the scholarly words contained in massive legal opinions. I sat on a tall stool, in front of a cream-colored Formica counter with casebooks, legal treatises, and handwritten notes spread out in front of me, surrounded by a stereophonic symphony of violins, French horns, and flutes. To some extent, I attribute my success in completing law school and passing the bar exam to those lengthy classically infused study sessions.
And there are the many little memories that are subliminally attached to specific songs in my favorite genre, classic rock and roll. Like the song “I’ve Been Searching So Long” by the band Chicago, reminds me each time I hear it that a blue Corvette passed me once on the road while that song was playing on my car radio. Or when I hear “Norwegian Wood” by the Beatles, I remember a sleepover at my best friend’s house and how we listened to it over and over until her older brother came home and scared us. Or when I hear “Another Park, Another Sunday” by the Doobie Brothers, it reminds me of a two-story white house that I drove by every day on the way to work years ago.
And, of course, some musical reflection is tied to the amazing songs themselves. I still get chills when I hear the guitar solo of Joe Walsh at 5:26 in “Long Road Out of Eden.” I never fail to turn the volume louder when I hear Whitney Houston sing “I Will Always Love You” or to wistfully sigh when I hear Steve Perry sing “Open Arms.” And I can’t resist leaping up to dance when I listen to the Motown recordings of Smoky Robinson and Al Green or the contemporary sound of Bruno Mars.
As I travel down this retrospective road, it is apparent that music has provided a soundtrack to my own life. It explains how my auditory memory was projected onto the beautiful introspective Lana Ross in Boulder Girl, Remember Me When the Moon Hangs Low. Melodies accompany her. Lyrics stream into her consciousness. Much the same for handsome and romantic Roadking who tells Lana to listen to “Roll Me Away” by Bob Seger because it’s what it feels like to ride a motorcycle. And the same for the sinister stalker, Leon, who unconsciously adopts Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” as his own anthem, while he justifies his evil actions. As the characters of Lana, Roadking, and Leon became real to me and took on lives of their own, I know that they would have loved the music that I gave them.
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