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Earliest Musical Memories -17/09/24

Recently my encyclopedic spotify playlist reached ten years old and it got me thinking about the variety of musical influences that led me to this strange and novel research avenue. The first song I remember really being struck by was ‘Windmills of Your Mind’, written by Marilyn and Alan Bergman in the 60s and most famously performed by Noel Harrison. We would sing this song in singing class at my primary school, with Mrs. Marr on piano and all of us rendering in naive falsetto these strange, twisting, psychedelic lyrics. The song to me at the time seemed almost occult, not that I had that word for it, full of secret knowledge and a real sense of metaphysical grasping. In this song the line between imagination and reality is basically obliterated and the speaker falls into spiralling internal exploration, surfacing briefly to ask questions like “Is the sound of distant drumming/Just the fingers of your hand”. To this day I’ve not found my particular brand of neurodivergent daydream described so deftly and this song still hits different.

Then I remember the albums my dad had in his car, primarily The Marshall Mathers LP, Get Rich or Die Tryin, and Appetite for Destruction. I found the way Eminem made clear the difference between his musical persona and his real life embodiment interesting, and Guns n’ Roses made accessible some of the metal and rock I explored in my teenage years. Linkin Park and Marilyn Manson spoke to a fairly unpopular young teenager, before I moved onto the second wave of Grime popularity. The lyricism of Grime artists definitely defined my later teenage years, if you check out the playlist you’ll find a fairly large grime section for a good few years. I’ve been blessed to be surrounded by an eclectic range of music, with more retro stuff from my mum and a few friends. I found the Grateful Dead mostly on my own.

A few of their tracks must have come into my rotation around the time I was starting my undergraduate degree in 2014. They are some of the first tracks on the playlist, though few and far between, at the time I was exploring Shoegaze and I’d just discovered the deeply confessional lyrics of Elliot Smith. You’ll find a lot in my musical past, but it is mostly lyrical, I have a hard time connecting with strictly instrumental music. Hopefully what you’ll find is something new.