Book Excerpt
Read song stories from the book.
“Music holds an unquestionable power to change us in ways we’d
never expect, and that’s the resonant power of these stories.”
—Benji Rogers, PledgeMusic and Dot Blockchain Music
Introduction
Songs become a part of the story of our lives. Their lyrics linger inside of us. We recall those words, but what we remember isn’t what they meant to the person who wrote them. It’s what they mean to us. We relate their lyrics back to the events that have happened in our lives. We interject our personal narrative into their songs, and it feels as though they mirror our own memories and emotions.
Some songs make us happy, while others bring sadness. Some songs connect with our present, and others bring us back to the past. They help us recall memories we’ve forgotten. Some songs are tied to our personal identities and to particular moments in our lives. Playing the song in later years helps us to recall an earlier event as well as the way we felt about it. This is what music does for us. It connects with the story of our lives. It creates meaning. It helps us understand ourselves.
We build a history of music throughout our lives that is unique to us, shaped by our tastes and life experiences. For many of us, it is the closest thing we have to the journal we never wrote or the diary that has long been packed away. The soundtrack of our lives is an ongoing playlist that we add to with each new experience. Each song holds a different significance, one that evolves as we change and grow as individuals. Unlike old journals and diaries, this soundtrack does not collect dust on a nightstand or in the bottom of a box but is stored on a smartphone that we take everywhere and hold tightly in our hands.
The time had come to collect and share these stories to create a people’s history of music. What you’ll read in this book are personal accounts of how people’s lives have been impacted by specific songs. Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars” set Cortney Harding’s romantic notions of adulthood, The Velvet Underground’s “Oh! Sweet Nuthin’” played one night at a friend’s place and changed Marc Ruxin’s musical tastes, and Coldplay’s “Lovers in Japan” reminds Caitlin Teibloom of a college breakup and who she became through that experience.
This alternate history, composed of shared song stories, will deepen your understanding of music. It’ll extend your interpretation of a song beyond what it means to you to how the song has been experienced by another and the meaning it has created in his or her life. Reading each story and playing the song will allow you to hear what music sounds like through ears other than your own.
I hope reading this book will inspire you to share your own song story.
–Kyle Bylin
1) “Logan to Government Center”
BRAND NEW
By Sachi Kobayashi
High school was rough for me. Due to misguided choices, failed attempts at overachieving, spells of depression, and overwhelming restlessness, I ended up going to three different schools, all within the same county. I desperately wanted out of high school. I wanted out of my dysfunctional family. I wanted out of my blue-collar state. I was so miserable that I tried to graduate early, collapsed under the course load instead, and ended up at yet another school.
I don’t think I could have survived high school if I hadn’t found the local DIY music scene, a vibrant mess of kids from northern Delaware that spilled over into parts of Pennsylvania. It was one of the only spaces where it felt safe to be myself: loud, opinionated, strange, and pissed. During the week, we scene kids were spread out among dozens of different schools, separated in little pockets or alone, but Saturday night we’d converge by the hundreds upon a rented hall or basement for a DIY show. The following week, if you passed another kid from the show on the street, you’d give each other a little knowing nod. I went from feeling like a social pariah to being initiated into a secret club. While the anarchist in me resisted joining anything, another part of me secretly hoped that if I tried hard enough, I might be one of the cool kids.
Bands from Toronto to Tampa would play our shows, but the band that lived in hallowed legend was Brand New. If you could claim that you had been at the American Legion hall shows they played in 2000, you had true scene cred. By the time that Your Favorite Weapon came out in 2001, I was utterly obsessed with Brand New. I listened to the album on my Sony Discman for hours on end, analyzing the lyrics for new layers of meaning. It felt as if every listen uncovered a new lyrical gem, like a message in a bottle from singer Jesse Lacey, promising survival to kids like me.
My favorite song was “Logan to Government Center.” I had fallen in love on first listen (a friend who was close to the band had a demo tape in his car for months before the official release).
What spoke to me most in this song was its theme of being alone; though I was so involved in the scene that I was putting on shows, I still felt very isolated. As a half-Asian girl whose parents both had multiple college degrees, I was almost the polar opposite of the rest of the kids in the scene, which was ruled by white guys from families that saw college as superfluous. Despite the differences, these were my people. No song reflected this tension or emptiness for me like “Logan to Government Center.”
Unlike other kids, I wasn’t allowed out on school nights, and my parents often didn’t have time to drive me to friends’ houses. For years, I blamed them for my solitude. If I’m truly honest with myself though, part of me liked it. At heart, I’m an introvert, and as a latchkey kid, I had lovely, wide swathes of time to be alone with my thoughts, listen to music, write in my journal, or draw. Just like the lyrics of the song, I was alone, but not really lonely. When occasionally I wanted company, I had Brand New who clearly understood me, because they had written “Logan to Government Center.”
As an adult, I’ve tried to listen to the many pop punk bands I worshiped as a teen, but a lot of it only holds up with a thick veneer of nostalgia. Still, “Logan to Government Center” rocks me to my core. To this day, it’s impossible for me to listen to this song without feeling a tug on my heartstrings. That introvert misfit kid grew up to be a woman who often feels awkwardly different and secretly loves to be alone, notwithstanding the affections of beloved friends, co-workers, and boyfriends who have always seemed more socially savvy. Fifteen years later, I’m still me, still alone, and still somehow content.
. . .
Sachi Kobayashi is an amateur transcendentalist and part-time culture vulture who has worked in the music industry for over a decade. She has her master’s in Communication Management from USC Annenberg, where her research focused on American ethnomusicology, digital media, and public radio.
2) “Scruffy Nerfherder”
VICTOR SHORES
By Derek Pinnick
I’m standing at the bathroom sink, dazed, scrubbing a mysterious mark off the back of my hand. It’s black, possibly an “X,” or maybe a smiley face. It’s tough to tell now. My ears are ringing like a bomb just went off, and I execute a series of controlled falls in the general direction of my bedroom. I’ve been punched, elbowed, and pressed into a crowd so tight that I could barely move. As I lay down on my bed, all I can think is, “That was awesome.”
This is a pretty accurate summary of most of my after-concert experiences. Growing up in sleepy Minot, North Dakota, there were only two music venue choices: see a band in a local bar, or wait until the North Dakota State Fair was in town and slam on your biggest Stetson hat. It may seem like a strange place to become a lifelong music lover, but it was in this wide, empty space that my affinity for music truly began.
Luckily, I wasn’t the first person in town to face this challenge. My musical forefathers created musical spaces, beginning with a place called “The Liberty,” which burned down just as I was becoming musically conscious. A litany of venues followed, popping up wherever rent was the cheapest and landlords were the most apathetic, with shows in basements of rental houses peppered in for good measure. The buildings would invariably be in some form of disrepair, but that’s what the scene called for. We needed something down-and-out, struggling, clinging on for life, just like we were. I have a lot of cheaply-made demos full of songs that remind me of those days, but none instantly transport me in the way that Victor Shores’ “Scruffy Nerfherder” does.
When I hear the tilted, staggering opening guitar line, my legs reflexively tense in preparation to begin jumping and hurling myself around in a wild, violent joy; a strange emotion that seems to only exist for the young and defiant. The song makes me want to scream — to punch, hug, and destroy all in the same instant. “Scruffy” is raw. For four minutes and eight seconds, you can hear the emotion of a man. You can hear his fear, anger, and his longing for meaning and love without an ounce of pretense. You hear the honesty that none of us, whether young or old, often have the courage to share.
I still feel this when I hear “Scruffy,” but as I get older, I feel new things, too. I’m approaching 30, and I still play these shows. At the time of writing this, my 2-year-old daughter just watched my band play a show in the stripped-out basement of a building. She danced to every song in her adorable, offbeat way. I hope that’s good. I hope that means she’ll see the value in creative expression and struggle to find spaces to create her art, to find her own “Scruffy.” I hope she’ll feel alive, like we did — like we still do.
. . .
Derek Pinnick is a lifelong North Dakotan, first from Minot, and then Fargo. He’s been playing in bands and going to basement shows pert’ near 15 years now, he reckons. He currently plays bass in a Fargo band called Boxcutter Kids, which you can hear on Spotify, Rhapsody, BandCamp, and other places.
3) “Just a Girl”
NO DOUBT
By Alison McCarthy
The year 1996 was awkward, and not just because I was a moody, gangly pre-teen girl who didn’t quite fit in, grumbling my way through the sixth grade in the suburbs of Long Island, New York.
It was also an extremely uncomfortable era for pop music. Grunge was breathing its last breath while Madonna was singing show tunes from Evita. The East Coast/West Coast hip-hop rivalry was about to turn lethal, and we were still a year or two away from when the Spice Girls, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and *NSYNC would be broadcast on our television screens via “Total Request Live.” It’s strange to think that there was a time when pop music wasn’t incredibly tied to youth culture — especially in our Taylor Swift/Beyoncé/Katy Perry-ruled universe — but in 1996, the pop airwaves were dominated by the adult contemporary sounds of Celine Dion, Melissa Etheridge, Hootie and the Blowfish, Natalie Merchant, and the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack.
Still, 1996 had one major highlight for me. It was the same year No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom broke onto mainstream radio. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect for an awkwardly skinny, freckle-faced, 12-year-old girl obsessed with music, art, and pop culture, who was just starting to ask questions about the larger world.
Like so many other songs that mattered to me during that era, I first heard No Doubt’s “Just a Girl” — their first single off Tragic Kingdom — while watching MTV past my bedtime. The music video was fun and catchy, but it had a slight punk edge that spoke directly to my teenage feelings. I was fascinated by Gwen Stefani’s and her bandmates’ sense of style, which combined both Southern California vintage glam and skater culture. Perhaps most importantly, its satirical message about growing up female and the predetermined gender roles available to girls made me feel understood. It was sassy, angry, powerful, and playful all at the same time, and it made some sense out of the frustration and confusion that came with being a girl quickly approaching adolescence.
In pure nineties fashion, I asked my dad to add Tragic Kingdom to his next Columbia House music club order for me. It arrived via snail mail a few weeks later, and from that point on, No Doubt was my band and Tragic Kingdom was my album.
On the last day of sixth grade, I got to see No Doubt — along with Weezer and the Lunachicks — live with my best friend. It was the first concert I attended without my parents and my first foray into live punk music, as mainstream as it was. My heart skipped when we arrived at Jones Beach Amphitheater. Suddenly, I saw that I wasn’t alone in feeling misunderstood, wanting to ask questions, and stepping outside the box. The venue was filled to the brim with 15,000 other kids who looked and felt like me. I knew I had found my people — my fellow suburban teen punk and alternative weirdos — and that these people, along with this music, were going to make everything okay.
I was right. These weirdos, in this alternative, punk, yet still suburban world soon became my best friends. By banding together to embrace our status as outsiders, our desire to ask questions and our love of music — as well as some very questionable fashion choices (ahem, JNCO jeans) — we got each other through the trials and tribulations and highs and lows of the next two decades. Even today, whenever “Just a Girl” comes on, we still sing every word along with Gwen.
. . .
Alison McCarthy is a writer at eMarketer, where she spends her days thinking about how different groups of people use the Internet. She has a BA in Media Studies from Emerson College and an MA in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University.
About the Book
Song Stories is an essay collection written by music professionals and independent artists about songs that impacted their lives.
