Three Songs That Changed My Life
There have been way more than three songs that have changed my life. And being a person who just dove into music really young, it’s hard to pull out the three most important. 30 years is a lot of time but thinking through all of the records, all of the mp3s, all of the tapes, and all of the emotion that’s packed away in those symbols of my youth, this is a good attempt at pulling out just three of those tracks.
There are more, and I hope there will continue to be more songs that completely change my life.
Jimmy Eat World — “For Me This is Heaven”
High school… definitely my junior or senior year. I went to a private Christian school and for the most part my musical taste had been defined by Christian radio, which is terrible and sad. We were rehearsing the praise band when one of my friends — it was Matt or Ryan, I don’t remember who exactly — said they wanted me to hear Clarity and tossed it on over the room PA.
Matt and Ryan, in combination, are responsible for introducing me to emo and indie rock, and Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity, on that morning, was the catalyst to a lifelong love. And while those friends got me started, I like to think we all joined in in helping each other find new bands and new sounds, forging an understanding that you only get with kindred musical spirits.
I remember Clarity playing a big role in our vocal ensemble tour that spring. There’s a still image burned into my memory of peering through the rear windshield of one of our cars and seeing that familiar artwork face-up in the window. Driving through Gilroy, California with the garlic smells and green for miles, with “Table for Glasses” cranked in my Discman.
That record was the soundtrack for miles and miles of California freeway.
Fast-forward into college a couple years later and “For Me This Is Heaven” became one of those tracks that swelled with melancholic memories. It gave me chills, and warmth, and half-smiles in nostalgia. It set the tone for lots of memories I look back on today. It’s a great piece of writing and an amazing record.
Sunny Day Real Estate — “Roses In Water”
Then there was How it Feels to be Something On… by Sunny Day Real Estate. I found it in a fragmented chronology. Its release was much earlier and I had been devouring the followup record. But the first time I heard the counter melodies and changing time signatures in the track “Roses in Water” a deep desire to create music swelled in me.
There are songs in life that just feel revelatory and profound and this song developed a deep love in me for Jeremy Enigk’s work and drove me to write better and more lyrics.
SDRE remains one of my all-time favorite bands, up there with Mineral and The Get Up Kids. And while I can’t pinpoint exactly the change this record had on me, I know that I didn’t think about music the same way ever again.
Copeland — “Testing the Strong Ones”
I purchased the first Copeland album, Beneath Medicine Tree during my freshman year of college. I pre-ordered it, actually, after seeing an ad on absolutepunk.net while researching some other band. That album was instrumental in my life’s path for one reason: it introduced me to The Militia Group.
The merits of that record are strong on its own and Beneath Medicine Tree played a big part in my listening habits, and still does today. But the way it changed my life is more profound than even Aaron Marsh’s falsetto.
In introducing me to The Militia Group, my career path was set.
I applied for and got an internship at Militia my senior year of college. And that internship introduced me to two of the most influential people on my life: Chad Pearson and Randall Jenkins. At Militia I promoted my first real bands and bumped my cool cred for having worked at a real indie label.
Chad introduced me to more alt.country than just the Ryan Adams and Jayhawks I had been listening to. But more, he became a friend that I still keep in touch with. A couple years after my summer at Militia, Randall started his own studio and hired me on to build WordPress sites for his clients. That foundational work built my skills and my portfolio, allowing me to start my own practice of web design and development.
I can trace it all back to Beneath Medicine Tree and the song that made me love that record from the first listen: “Testing the Strong Ones”.
