Now that we’re the chaotic days of pre-production, with never ending to-do lists and obsessively watching the progress of our Kickstarter campaign for Self-Titled, I’m feeling a little nostalgic for those golden days when we were just a writing group. We’d gather in Mandy’s kitchen and eat delicious snacks (sometimes there was champagne). We’d read what we wrote that month and talk about what we discovered while writing it and what our work sparked in each other. And then we’d get to pick a new album out of the hat. This was the best moment of all because I never knew if I was just about to be introduced to my new favorite band.

The very first month that we started writing, either luck or fate sent me Dresden Dolls. I don’t know how I’d missed The Dresden Dolls before that moment because they hooked me from the opening line of the first song. I’d been putting off listening because once I started there was going to be this obligation to find SOMETHING TO WRITE ABOUT and to MAKE IT WORTHWHILE and PROVE MYSELF, but as it turned out, I didn’t even think about writing that first time and the second time I forgot to.

The album is right up my alley: it’s unapologetically feminine, undeniably feminist, twisty, dark, funny, and ridiculously theatrical. When I finally started writing, I didn’t focus on any one song or story, I listened to the style and the rhythm of the album. A character emerged, and then another. A title. An old idea that I’d been wanted to use in a play but never found the story that fit. Somehow Sleeping Beauty got involved. And that delicious tension of more than a minute of silence before the very last line. I wanted to do that on stage. Could I do that on stage?

I wrote a play. Girl Anachronism isn’t going to be part of Self-Titled this summer, and part of me is sad about this (even though I also love Introduction to Experiences based on Are You Experienced?) simply because it was the first time that I saw what music could inspire me to write. Here's a taste of what got me started:

 Dresden Dolls is in regular rotation on my iPod, and I still listen to the whole album every single time. 

                The recent departure of Zayn Malik from One Direction has prompted many tears and cries of “whhhhhhhhhhhy?” from some of the tweenage girls in my acquaintance. Like many, I had to fight my initial impulse to roll my eyes and dismiss their heartbreak for a silly band that most people over the age of 18 probably don’t have much regard for. However, throughout the drama, it forced me to examine my own music history, particularly the music I listened to when I was a wee lass of 12. Excuse me while I hum a few bars of “The Sign” and sing about a boy “who got into an accident and couldn’t go to school”.

               This of course sent me down a nostalgia spiral of examining all of the songs and artists I listened to in Middle School and High School that I’m sure drove my parents to find any excuse to leave the house. I’m looking at you Britney, and you Justin Timberlake while you were still just one of five sexually nonthreatening boys in N’Sync. There were many fine afternoons spent sitting in my room with my girlfriends belting out some Jagged Little Pill or Little Earthquakes. And school dances with Ska music blasting while we all skanked enthusiastically in a circle. Could I even begin to try and explain this to today’s generation? The one time I tried, I learned “Skank” has taken on a very different meaning.

              The music we listen to in our teenage years is sacred. I couldn’t even tell you today how much of it is “good” music because it is so deeply tied to memories from my formative years. I can no more judge these girls their One Direction than I would want to be judge for the elaborate dance we came up with to “I Want it That Way”. No video exists of this dance, so don’t even try and find it. It’s an expression of our budding independence and of course, angst. The idea that no one could understand us, but this band, this artist, touches a chord in me. It might be One Direction. Maybe it was The Beatles, or The Who. Nirvana. Prince. Elvis. Why we love the music we love is not something we should ever have to justify or explain. So the next time you hear a shrieking girl exclaiming over Justin Bieber, resist the automatic snort of disgust and instead, think back to who your Bieber was and send a little love.    

Most of my favorite memories have a soundtrack. Road trips with my parents: any and all Jim Croce, Anne Murray, Simon and Garfunkel, or The Beach Boys albums. The hit 1982 album, Mousercise, kept my sister and I dancing with the cousins all night long in someone’s rec-room during an adult party. When I was very little I used to fall asleep to the pop-light station and as a 5 year old could belt out such classics from Christopher Cross, Reo Speedwagon, and Billy Joel. Solo summer train trips at the age of 12 to visit my Grandma was scored with “True Blue”, the next summer “Like a Prayer” (a nod to my maturing tastes). A vacation to Southern California that featured Disneyland and two freshly purchased Monkee’s albums (tapes) that could not be found in Walla Walla (unless one had the gumption to ask Jim McGuinn of Hot Poop Records to special order things, which my 12-year-old self could not). Christmas revelry wouldn’t have been complete without Bing Crosby or off-key carols belted out in the car on the way to Grandpa’s. There was a summer family reunion a few years back on the 4th of July with a mandatory patriotic sing-a-long (I will spare the vocalists the video I have). I remember being with an entire bus full of teenage girls going to a NKOTB concert in Tacoma (from Walla Walla) and predictably screeching out their entire anthology (thus far) on the way up.  I remember Larry softly singing Keith Sweat’s “Twisted” to our newborn baby during a midnight feeding, much to my surprise and delight. I remember Mötley Crüe's “Dr. Feelgood” being blared way too loudly from a jerry-rigged amp in a certain boy’s VW bug while on a secret thrill ride to Spokane, which ended up only being as far as 20 minutes out of town until the car broke down. I remember hearing a song dedicated to me by my 7th grade paramour-”Keep your Hands to Yourself” by the Georgia Satellites-a song I do not particularly care for, but one that will forever be intertwined with my memory of that boy and that moment in time.


Songs older than 10 or 15 years trigger a memory of some kind for me...not always good ones, or legal ones for that matter. Any “experimenting” I did involved music, dances, concerts (oh...the concerts) hanging out in moody teenage solitude alone in my room. These moments evoke less specific memories for me now, because it’s how I spent so much of my time, escaping the inescapable pain from traumas real and perceived. To crawl inside the beautiful sadness numbed me to the ugly reality of the world beyond the headphones. This was the time of The Cure, The Smiths, R.E.M...to name a few.

Music is no less important to me now. I get a rush the first time I hear a song I love. It’s like a first kiss. Nostalgia has it’s place, but so does the thrill of discovering something new. I have very specific memories of hearing favorite songs for the first time, a list that is too long and personal for a blog post.

It’s for all these reasons and more that music inspires me and leaves me with a constant soundtrack running in my mind as my memories dance together. All of my favorite memories have a soundtrack.