The Songs That Shaped Me: The Third Decade

I’m obviously GenX through and through, and the world does not clamor for any more ink about how Janeane Garofalo’s style and ethos pretty much embodies everything my generation stands for, although it is completely true. The ’90s was our decade to shape, but so many of our avatars for what we wanted and what we would become got snuffed out early on. Tupac Shakur. Kurt Cobain. And yet, we soldier on, even though we still wear combat boots and act like we don’t care. The problem is not that we don’t care; it’s that we care too much.

Read on for the third decade of the songs that shaped me.

(If you haven’t yet, check out Decade One and Decade Two. Listen to all the songs here.)

1992: “Nightswimming” by R.E.M. Purists scoff at everything R.E.M. made after they left IRS Records for Warner Bros. in 1988, calling it too commercial. There is truth in this. Green and Out of Time, their first two major-label albums, are much more commercial (to wit, the inescapability of “Stand” and “Losing My Religion”). After those two albums, however, they pivoted to make the sweetly elegiac Automatic For the People. The “I loved them first!” crowd will pass this album by, and they will point to “Everybody Hurts” as proof that this album is just as commercial as the others, but they do themselves a disservice.

This version of R.E.M. has seen some shit.

I could have added several songs from this album here. “Sweetness Follows,” with its complex themes of love and death. “Star Me Kitten” — the star replaces The F Word — which is sexy in a “we’re shutting this bar down and have nowhere else to go so, how about you and me in the bathroom?” kind of way. I chose the gentle “Nightswimming,” which drips with nostalgia, memory, and recognizing the beauty in a past filled with lost love. Who among us can’t relate?

This one was hard. I have to give a shout-out to “One” by U2, which is a gorgeously damn near perfect song. When I saw the video for “In Bloom” by Nirvana, I had to fall in love not just with the music, but with the humor and (being honest here) drop-dead gorgeousness of Kurt Cobain. “Sliver,” released on Nirvana’s album Incesticide in 1992, was a better song. Finally, on an evening during which alcohol might or might not have been consumed, I belted out the Whitney Houston version of “I Will Always Love You” in a hotel bathroom as if I was auditioning. My friend Scott, listening from the other room, offered me a job in a band that, sadly, never happened. It got my brain gears rolling — could I ever be a singer?

1993: “Outbreak of Love,” Midnight Oil. Scott, the aforementioned friend, was in the same friend group as Rob and his Cute Best Friend. I heard a lot from Scott about the Cute Best Friend, though I rarely had chances to hang out with him. Truth be told, I was nervous and tended to avert my eyes from him as if to hide from the sun.

One night, right before Midnight Oil was playing in town, Scott and another friend and I were rambling around and getting a coffee at Cup A Joe, the Hillsborough Street institution in Raleigh. Scott needed the rest room and, because he is visually impaired, I got up to help him find it. There are two rooms in Cup A Joe; we were in the front room, and the bathroom was in the back of the other room. When we went into the next room, I heard a voice yell, “Robin!” Standing up at the back table and waving was The Cute Best Friend, sitting with Rob. Waving at me. I thought he didn’t even know my name.

The Cute Best Friend, whose name was Steve, made a seat for me right next to him. He had had several of Cup A Joe’s infamous King Quads; I wondered how he’d ever sleep that night. He asked Scott and me to come dancing with him and Rob that night, and then to hang out with them at his place afterward. He gave Scott and me a ride back to Cup A Joe to get my car and, before we left, I said, “Um, hey, I am going to Midnight Oil next week with a bunch of my friends. Wanna come?” Fortunately for me, he said yes. I rounded up some friends to go — I had not bought tickets yet and figured a “friend date” was a smooth face-saver in case he wasn’t interested in me — and we all went. Midnight Oil was touring to support the quite excellent album Earth and Sun and Moon and its lead single, “Outbreak of Love,” which is not a normal Song of Love but is my favorite one all the same.

We never left each other’s side.

A few weeks later, Steve and I went to see Depeche Mode (his favorite band) and “One Caress” became one of Our Songs. I wrote a review of the show, which got me noticed by a national magazine that hired me to write about the Chapel Hill music scene. Writing career launched! We also listened obsessively to Into the Labyrinth by Dead Can Dance, still one of my favorite albums. I was always partial to “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove,” so I give it a special mention here.

It’s impossible for me to keep sentiment out of my memories of 1993 but, if I could, I’d put the entirety of Rid of Me by P.J. Harvey here. It’s impossible to pick a song, but I guess I’ll go with the title track. Her gender-bending shouts and her rawness (“You leave me dry”) gave me, with no hyperbole, a new standard through which to listen to music. It’s one of my “desert island” albums.

1994: “The Man Who Sold the World,” the Nirvana version from MTV Unplugged (original by David Bowie). When Kurt Cobain ended his life with a baggie of heroin and a shotgun, my friend and I were at her dad’s condo in Arlington, Virginia, going to a field trip at the National Museum of Ancient Art in Washington. We responded as any 21- and 22-year-old women would: We got unreservedly, gobsmackingly, blitzkrieg drunk (sorry, Dad) and cried our eyeballs out. So much so, in fact, that we slept through the field trip the next day.

I don’t know why I was so shocked. One look at Kurt Cobain during his MTV Unplugged performance earlier in the year told us he was a man not long for this world. His cheekiness has been replaced by a vacant shell, his eyes devoid of light. Still, the raw power of his voice is there. Where David Bowie sings coolly, as if to say, “Sure, I sold the world, what of it?”, Kurt Cobain’s delivery is all torture. He’s sold the world, and now he’s sending himself to Hell.

Hole’s album Live Through This and the song “Miss World” got me through this time. Hearing a living link to Kurt Cobain made me want to forge on as well. I was so young and emotionally volatile, and his death left a great void in me and in so many others of my generation. And beyond: Nirvana and Kurt Cobain inspired my GenZ son to take up guitar. His room is covered with Nirvana memorabilia. The legacy lives on.

Elsewhere, “Sour Times” by Portishead became a big part of my musical life a few years on; and if all you’ve heard is “Kiss From a Rose” from Seal’s eponymous album of this year, find “Prayer For the Dying.” Lushly arranged, danceable, with poetic and occasionally ambiguous lyrics, it’s both beautiful and moving. “I may not know what you’re going through/But time is the space between me and you/Life carries on.”

1995: “Spiderwebs” by No Doubt. Nowadays, if I’m going to listen to music from this year, it’s more likely going to be TLC or Monica. Back in 1995, however, I was listening endlessly to No Doubt’s breakout album and “Spiderwebs,” the title track, which was my favorite. What young woman of my era didn’t admire Gwen Stefani? She had a broad, unconventional voice that alternated between kittenish and brassy, not to mention enviable abs.

1996: “Crash Into Me” by Dave Matthews Band. Steve, the Cute Best Friend, and I stood on a North Carolina beach in May of this year and said vows in front of our families and friends. After the wedding, we drove to Florida for our honeymoon in a rented car and didn’t think to bring any tapes with us. We got tired of trying to find decent radio stations and, at a gas station in South Carolina, we looked through the cassette bin to find something to listen to. We picked up Crash and a couple of other tapes, I can’t remember what. For sweet baby newlyweds, this was the perfect song to have on loop.

Honorable mention: “The Distance,” CAKE. We still listen to this song way too much.

1997: “Tubthumping” by Chumbawumba. Oh, man, my husband hated this song, but our friend loved it. This very Irish friend, who was a fixture at our house, was one of my favorite people. Regularly, he made us both laugh until we cried. Once, he defended my honor at a Shane MacGowan concert by punching a drunken asshole. This friend had two very sweet young children who had been our flower girl and ring bearer (or, as this adorable boy used to call himself, “Flower Boy”). I loved those kids so much, they made my ovaries hurt. This song is the perfect embodiment of that friend: He gets knocked down, he gets up again. You are never gonna keep him down. Lyrically and musically, it’s … simple. It wouldn’t have made a blip in any other decade. But in this decade rife with one-hit wonders, it feels only right to put one on the list.

This year was more than its one-hit wonders. “Say Yes” is the happiest song Elliott Smith ever wrote, sweet and melodic: “I’m in love with the world/Through the eyes of a girl/Who’s still around the morning after.” Also, we got Portishead’s second album, dark and grinding. “Only You” is a great song for a bad day.

1998: “Ray of Light” by Madonna. The only thing Madonna and I have in common is, we both had our first children around the same time. There were so many things that happened in this year that filled me with delight. I saw my old first-grade best friend for the first time in years — he had just moved back to North Carolina from Alaska and brought his wife and son with him to meet our brand-new baby. For weeks, every day was a party. Everyone wanted to celebrate our beautiful daughter.

For months, though, even though I got to spend time with a brand-new wonder, I also felt myself consumed by postpartum depression. Who am I now? Am I still me? A new mom enters the hospital as a woman and leaves as a mom. There is a difference. Over time, you figure out how to meld the two; at least, so it was for me. But I became aware that in the hospital, I was just a vessel, and my worth in the world had changed. I love being a mother. I really do. I always have. But one can love someone to her core, truly feel that her children are her hearts outside her body, and also feel lost at sea. For this, guilt consumed me.

When I saw Madonna put words to all these feelings on a talk show, I was on the couch, holding my newborn, smelling her baby smell, delighting in her hands, and sobbing tears of gratitude. If the Mother of Reinvention can suffer the same identity crisis, maybe I wasn’t a freak or a bad mother. Once again, she had reinvented herself. Madonna, now with child, exuded softness and femininity and transformational spirituality. My baby daughter and I danced round and round the house to this song and the whole album. I had entered the year a woman and left it not only a mother, but preparing to be a mother for a second time. Our family had entered into its new reality.

I give an honorable mention to “Babylon” by David Gray, which I discovered a few years later (2004) snuggling a different baby in the middle of the night. He performed it on Graham Norton’s show, which I caught in the wee hours of the morning on BBC America, sitting on that same sofa in a different house, looking at sweet baby eyes peering into mine. Also, Lenny Kravitz released 5 in this year. The song “Thinking of You,” which he wrote for his mother, makes me think of mine.

1999: “Sheep Go To Heaven,” CAKE. One of my favorite memories from a couple of years later is of my two young daughters, the second of whom was born in 1999, singing this song at the top of their lungs in the car. “Sheep go to Heaven/Goats go to Hell!” Was I a bad mom or the best mom? I’m going with the latter.

Had I had a bit more wherewithal, what with the exhaustion of having two glorious babies and four hours of driving with them per day (I’ll spare you the details), I might have paid more attention to “Ex-Factor” by Lauryn Hill. I could listen to her all day long. Plus, this was the first song my son learned on the drums. Also, I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for “Scrubs” by TLC. Scrub-free zone here!

2000: “Who Let the Dogs Out?”, Baha Men. Who did it? We’ll never know.

The Baha Men will never have to work again, I hope, after turning out this ubiquitous banger. Is it a great song? NO! It features woofing noises. It is almost certainly what the “Doggy Bounce” from “Flight of the Conchords” was based upon.

But: On Christmas Day 2000, my mother burst into the door of our house with a stuffed rodent (a hamster, I think?) that played this song when you squeezed it. She was laughing so hard, and she gave it to our daughters and started dancing around and shaking her butt. We have it on video. Steve and I cannot hear this song without thinking of the pure, uncomplicated, un-self-conscious joy my mother displayed in that moment. My baby daughters collapsed into giggles, and so did we. It was a perfect moment that made “Who Let the Dogs Out?”, far and away, my favorite song of 2000.

It is not, however, the best song of 2000. Sufjan Stevens released his debut, A Sun Came!, and “Demetrius” is an epic ride of a song that sounds great loud. The song that’s most likely to send me back to this era, however, is “I Try” by Macy Gray. Mom loved this song, and so did I. We need more of her gorgeous, gravelly voice.

2001: TIE: “Drink the Water,” Jack Johnson and “Hey Baby,” No Doubt.

In the early part of the year, I wore out my CD of Brushfire Fairytales, Jack Johnson’s debut album. It’s chock-full of winsome, happy, singable, feel-good songs. Jack Johnson must never have had a bad day in his life. “Drink the Water,” a song about surfing, sounds like a song you’d play on your old acoustic while you look at the waves late at night, waiting for the sun to come. I’m a sucker for any song that reminds me of the ocean, you must have gathered.

There was all of this, and then September came.

The world that Americans woke to on the morning of the 11th, and the world that Americans fell asleep on, felt very different. That’s just for those who didn’t lose somebody, or many people, on that awful day. It’s hard to explain this to my GenZ kids, none of whom remember. How can one explain the trauma of seeing thousands of people lose their lives over the course of a few hours?

At the end of September, early on a weekend morning, Steve and I entered the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The sun began its daily ascent, casting its deep peach glow across the sky. Then: Someone in the broadcasting booth cranked “Hey Baby” by No Doubt. It reverberated off the metal. Good morning, world!

We were at Indy for the US Grand Prix. Steve and I, it turned out, had both grown up with Formula One racing. We both had nerves about attending a huge sporting event so close to the end of the world as we knew it but, also, we had had our tickets for months. To be greeted by this song from the Before Times settled my nerves a little: “Gwen Stefani is singing as if nothing ever happened, so maybe we’ll be fine.” We took each others’ hands and sat in a crowd, watching the skies and the track in equal measure. Life carried on, and we were forever changed.

In a week-ish: The early aughts.