Music Notes

The Bard's Hall, June 2025, Entry 2

Ẃeβ࿚Ẃỉtcĥ StephBee "The Bard's Hall Contest" 

My relationship with music has evolved dramatically over my lifetime. I've always been fascinated by music; as a toddler and small child I easily identified songs on the radio from the slightest samples. I never quite understood the meaning behind lyrics, if I even understood the lyrics.

I should say, I have had no musical training whatsoever. I can't sing or play any instruments, and lack even a basic knowledge of music theory, which is embarrassing for someone who's been totally obsessed with music for the past ten years or so.

Growing up in a strict household where my mom developed her piety to a higher level as the years passed, my exposure to music was quite limited. In the early years, she played the radio in the car, so I heard old rock and current country as we went through the process of moving from Florida up to Tennessee. I started calling old rock (Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Rolling Stones, etc) “Florida music.”

Later on at home, she played a little of this and that occasionally: Tom Petty, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Temptations. No more than a song or two or three from each of them. I never cared much for the music she liked back then, not having any clear idea of what it was about or what the point of music even was beyond the lyrics. It was simply there, a soundtrack to my early childhood, embedded forever in my memories.

As I grew older and Mom played less music at home, I became more keenly aware of the music surrounding me outside. It's funny how in our small town in Tennessee, every public building had the radio on: the bank, post office, small businesses, loan offices, grocery stores, thrift stores, etc. It wasn't solely country music, either, as one might assume.

I have tight associations of certain songs to certain places where I first encountered them; Don Henley's Heartache Tonight always reminds me of a local grocer’s called FoodLand, where the owner played a particular type of eighties rock. I used to mondegreen it as “gonna be a party tonight” and assumed it was a silly, empty-headed song.

Our local post office usually played a radio station labeling itself as “eighties, nineties and today,” and since we spent hours waiting in line to run errands, I learned many a song there which I now look back on with nostalgic fondness: OneRepublic’s Counting Stars, Christina Perri’s A Thousand Years, Tears for Fears Shout, Mumford and Sons I Will Wait, Ellie Goulding's Lights, and Philip Phillips Home.

I was so fascinated by the vast world of music, I started scribbling scraps of lyrics that caught my fancy in the margins of my journals. Most of them were half-baked mondegreens…

These days of knowing songs existed, without knowing anything about them, caused some misunderstandings. Certain ones I assumed did not have wholesome lyrics turned out, when I looked into them, to be classics of the era. I particularly remember being upset by the EchoSmith song Cool Kids, hearing it for the first time on a radio in an office building. I bounced it off angrily in my journal against the Gwendolyn Brooks poem We Real Cool. It took several years before I realized what the theme is.

It wasn't until I received my first personal Internet access via a smartphone in 2015 that I really started exploring music. At first I simply absorbed the lyrics to everything I heard without paying attention to much else. In 2017, I took a deeper dive into musical exploration and became a consciously obsessed fan, first of OneRepublic and then Imagine Dragons. This is when I began actively choosing and listening to music as a hobby, rather than merely passively evaluating whatever I happened to hear in public.

The move to listening to music on my own terms, funnelled inside my head, was a big one for me. I'd never owned a pair of earbuds before, nor ever had the opportunity to say “I want to hear this song.” It opened up a vast universe of creativity, analysis and learning. I wrote copious notes on my opinions about what I was listening to, leaving myself a paper trail of my evolutionary path as I developed my tastes and sorted music into different styles, eras and categories.

I don't do streaming music because I dislike the elements of uncertainty and the fickle, amoral algorithms involved. Plus, I believe music should be free, at least as much as possible.

When I figured out how to download and store my favorite tracks offline on an old inactive phone, I felt like I'd conquered the world. Finally I had what I'd dreamed of: exactly what I wanted to hear when and where I wanted, without the bother of an intermittent internet connection or the drain of leaving the screen lit up with a YouTube video. When I discovered panning, layered sound via a pair of $5 truly wireless earbuds from Dollar Tree, it was another epiphany.

The world of music has contributed to my growth, inspiration and mental wellness in infinite ways. My first social media account was in support of music (Wolf Angel/Thoughtfullyricist on Genius), the first and most meaningful pen pals I made were fellow music nerds, and the first time I've felt understood and validated in my own skin was while snuggled between the notes of songs. Dan Reynolds and his support of the LGBTQ community encouraged me to reevaluate my identity and come out as proudly asexual in 2019.

Music has always been present in my life, and as I've grown up, it has become an inseparable part of who I am, with lyrics and melodies woven into my soul, forming an indelible patchwork road map of my life's journey. Each song is a landmark, pointing out where I was at a particular moment both mentally and geographically.

I was always hesitant to share much about myself in public… in the words of a demo track from OneRepublic: “I'm something special, maybe something nice, but I don't have it figured like they do/ you see I got my worries, and I got my vice—there's nothing ‘bout my world that they're used to.”

Music helped teach me I have far more in common with the rest of humanity than I thought. To close, here's the 1R demo I quoted. It's a nostalgic piece for me on many levels, and in fact I previously blogged about it for the Barrel of Monkeys challenge. "The Perfects, OneRepublic (Demo)" 

Words: 1,088.