Growing up, I was raised by the Big Chill and Dirty Dancing soundtracks. I can still see the dust whirling through the air on the weekends my mother would deep clean the house belting out "Tears of a Clown."
We didn't drive anywhere without music. I associated my mother's mini van with Marvin Gaye, The Bangles, Fine Young Cannibals, George Michael... I associated my father's truck with Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Roy Orbison, Lynyrd Skynyrd...
Music was everywhere, and then one day it wasn't.
It became my job to fill my room with The Cranberries, Nirvana, Foo Fighters, anything Fat Wreck Chords put out, all the local bands tapes and CD's that littered my purse post show.
I don't remember the exact time frame that I realized my mother's car radio stopped playing. I don't know why she stopped. I don't know how she could get into her car and not subconsciously start pushing buttons on her dash until something that resonated with her became her soundtrack to drive to. I know that it makes me sad to slide into her passenger seat with a palpable silence between us.
Little has a bad habit of screaming "Alexa/Siri STOP" whenever I play music and I want to hand him earplugs. I need the lyrics to sing to me and to speak to me. I need all that noise to make sense of my world. I feel the bass, I resonate with the words.
I used to joke that mine and Gwen Stefani's lives paralleled. As I expanded out of my teenaged cocoon, we both left our teenaged loves behind for the hot bad boys of our lives. We got married, each had three beautiful children, our Husbands had affairs with women who were too easily accessed, we found love again... and then the parallel's stopped. As she announced that she was engaged to her big country boyfriend, I was announcing that we were over.
A part of me worries that I've upset the balance of the cosmos. Every album had spoken to my heart and brought words I couldn't find to experiences I was going through. I'm almost anxious to hear her new single because what if we are no longer experiencing the same seasons in life together?
It's trivial and ridiculous to think this way, but... what if I'm right?
What if, the reason no single genre or song is currently speaking to me because the music is dying in me the way it did for my parents?
I don't know that I could handle the loss of relevance music has in my life.
For my parents, the music died and they are still very much alive.
The music died on a trip when newly married and I was playing my favorite mix, singing along, and he reached over and turned it off saying it hurt his head. And so we drove in silence there and back. It was 2.5 hours one way.
ReplyDeleteFor awhile, I listened to his church songs. Then I listened to the children's VBS songs while they were in the car and sing with them.
And then, I pretty much just stopped. Sometimes, when I am writing or editing, I turn Pandora on and listen to my favorite "station" I created called Raspberry Beret. It's all the artists I've listened to in the past, and when alone in the house, I still turn it way up. But I am alone when I do. Same with people in the car, but when alone, I turn on my favorite station and listen and sometimes sing along. But since silence has been the main song in this marriage, I guess it will be until the end.