As I’ve said to anyone who would listen, music is my safe space. It is the one thing I know I can turn to that will help me process emotions better than anything else. I made a post on Facebook this past week about how the song HELLO by Adele hit me in an unexpected way while on a morning walk. In a space in my life where I am working on self-improvement, a song involving a woman speaking to a lost/forgotten love, was heard by a 43 year old man lost in his own thought, and heard present-day me talking to a younger version of myself.

Recently I sat to try and make a list of songs that I could remember the exact moment I heard them, and I don’t mean recent ones, I mean ones from my youth and early 20’s.  I got up to 12. And while in the middle of typing this, I thought of a  13^th.

While i may cover each one of these songs over time, there are a handful of songs that I’d like to go over in particular, as they play a massive roll in my music tastes. Today I’d like tot talk about two in particular and while they don’t really have anything in common, I discovered them on the same day.

While I don’t remember how old I was, I do remember which house we lived in and the circumstances in which my taste in music began to etch it’s benings into my being.

I was young, I’ll guesstimate around 6 or 7 years old (mid-80’s). I was playing in the garage of the house we lived in in Chula Vista, CA. I found a pile off cassette tapes on a shelf next to an old radio with a player that my dad had sitting next to it.

I opened one of the cases and popped the cassette into the radio and hit play like I had watched my parents do 100 times. The rattle of a tambourine and the opening cords of an electric guitar strummed and I immediately remember bobbing my head. The harmonious sound of voices came out faster than I expected matching the music it was over. and I was lost in the sound.

The song was Last Train to Clarksville by the Monkees.

When the song ended I rewound the tape, thinking it was go all the way back and start with that song again, but then before I knew it, I was listening to the title track, The Monkees which was even more upbeat and headbopping inducing. I remember pulling the tape out and putting it back in the case, pocketing it and taking it to my room where I would listen to it on repeat for days.

But it wasn’t the only song I discovered that day, nor the only genre of music that I fell in love with.  Amongst the same tapes was a mix tape that one of my parents had won from a local radio station that had a collection of music on it. I tried skimming through the music on the cassette to find something I liked, and nothing really caught my attention accept one. I rewound the beginning of the song because I loved the sound and soul of the music that was playing. This is the first time I can remember the opening sound of a piano on a song grab me. To this day the opening key strokes are engrained in my head.

The song was Blueberry Hill by Fats Domino.

Both of these songs have a permanent place on any streaming collection of music I have. It’s the earliest memories I have of music having an effect on me and to this day have been massive inspirations for the music tastes I have.