Oftentimes I’ll choose a song for one of my posts or reels, and I wonder if my followers think that I’ve finally lost it. I’ll put a song from Girl In Red over a photo of me wearing rolled up jeans, and everyone will be giving me suspicious looks for the rest of the year. I’ll use a song from Bullet For My Valentine’s latest album, and people will be sending me contact info for their therapist. I think if I ever write a book about myself, the title will be something along the lines of “101 Reasons I’m Not Crazy, and 102 Reasons To Prove That Statement Is False.” So anyway, here we go on another one of my tangents where I say, “It’s okay! I can explain!” and this time, it’s about my absolutely insane taste in music and where it came from. Fasten your seat belts, this is going to be a wild ride.

Rewind nineteen years. Since I was born, I lived in a family where music was a part of every day life. At every meal we shared, my dad played one of the CDs off of his wall-sized collection. On the seven-hour drive we made to visit our extended family, there was a stack of CDs in the center console. At the age of seven, I decided that my favorite band was The Beatles, at eight it was The Neal Morse Band, and at nine it was Joe Bonamassa. I could recognize most classic rock bands when I heard them in public, knew the names of some of their band members, and was in the process of learning the history behind each band that I loved. It was, and still is a dream of mine to become a rock history encyclopedia.

When I was twelve, I went to my first ever live concert in Atlanta, GA, to see the Swedish power metal band Hammerfall. My family listened to their albums leading up to the concert, but nothing could have prepared me for the life altering experience I had there. Surrounded by people decked out in all black headbanging around me, I learned that the world of metal was a community. From there on out, Hammerfall was decidedly my favorite band. I hung photos from the concert on my wall, made a poster for them in my graphic design class, and downloaded their discography to an A-Z folder on my MP3 player. I wore the shirt from their concert almost every week until the graphic began to wear off.

Later that year, I went to see The Neal Morse Band for their two-night concert in Cross Plains, TN. I got to hear one of my favorite albums (The Similitude of a Dream) performed in its entirety, and most importantly, I met the lead guitarist of the band after the show. He became my guitar hero after that. I began learning his guitar solos, and even saved up so that I could buy the same guitar as he had. (For those wondering, it was an Ernie Ball Music Man JP12 seven string.) After going to two concerts in one year, I was overflowing with inspiration. When anyone asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I told them with confidence that I wanted to be a rockstar.

During the second half of my freshman year of high school, I began to struggle with my mental health. The spring semester of 9th grade was in the year 2020, which was a whole new kind of hell for me, unlike anything I had ever experienced before. One of the biggest things that kept me afloat during that time was the music that completely took me away from the world I was living in. Instead of listening to emotional music that brought me even deeper into despair, I spent a lot of time listening to classic rock, prog, and metal; music that was made in a time where my struggles didn’t exist. Whether or not that kind of dissociation was considered healthy, it was a lifeline for me. That’s what metal has and always will be for me. A home base. A safe place.

Now, up until this point, all of the music I listened to could fall into subgenres of rock and metal. I took the most unexpected turn in 2021 when I participated in a songwriting masterclass with a prog rock artist. He is one of my favorite songwriters, and in the class he told us something that I never would have expected to hear from a sixty year old man. He was listing albums that he admired the songwriting on, and mentioned the album Evermore by Taylor Swift.

Up until that point, I had heard only a few Taylor Swift songs, (specifically the 1989 radio hits,) and never really considered her music to be something that I might be interested in. But because I valued the opinion of the artist who recommended her, I decided to give her a try. I found the album on YouTube, and was completely blown away by it. It was not at all what I expected based on the complaints I heard about her on an everyday basis. I slowly began to dig into her discography after this, and soon, I was a full blown swiftie. It was at this point that I truly began to value songwriting and lyricism just as much as the music behind it.

As both a metalhead and a swiftie, it’s pretty much impossible to make friends who share my taste in music. The metalheads think I’m a poser because I like the biggest popstar in the world, and the swifties think I’m a weirdo because I intentionally listen to people screaming. The Middle-Aged-Facebook-Conspiracy-Moms™ hate both, and therefore think that I’m possessed by a demon for two different reasons. Which brings me to the next part of my music journey.

Later in high school, I was part of a community where I discovered an ideology that I thought could only be found in movies like Footloose. This group of people believed that secular music was inherently evil. It sounds comical to say out loud, but they were dead serious about it. Now, you remember how I said that I didn’t listen to much emotional music in 2020? In these years, I made up for that. I found refuge in the world of emo metal, metalcore, and post hardcore. “Do It Now, Remember It Later,” and “Kick me,” by Sleeping With Sirens became my teenage rebellion anthems. You know how in the teen movies the angsty protagonist yells “It’s not a phase, mom!” before slamming her door? That was me, except I wasn’t yelling it at my mom. (She was listening to Pierce the Veil with me in the car with the windows down as we rolled in.) I was yelling it at all the people who were trying their best to take my safe place away from me.

It was in my senior year and beyond that my music taste became truly as diverse as it is today. I began a routine where every Friday I went on my YouTube homepage and opened about twenty or so new songs to listen to. That is where I found some of the strangest but most unique and incredible bands. I never would have found artists like IDKhow and Jhariah otherwise. Along with my weekly YouTube adventures, I screenshot the titles of songs that I like from Instagram reels, and listen to every single song my friends recommend. My taste in music is a magic stew of all of the things that I have experienced over my time here on earth. I have a backstory for every part of it.

And through all the insanity that has been my life up until now, if you were to ask me about my favorite memories of my teen years, about ninety percent of them will be related to music. If you asked me what got me through the worst times, the dark nights of the soul, I would say music. Because no matter what I went through, who stayed, who left, that music was always there. The variety that I listen to can definitely be considered… weird. But each and every song I love has filled a specific space in my life. Isolation, breakups, depression, judgment, anger, and burnout are a lot easier to put up with when you have an epic soundtrack playing in the background. Because in the words of Hammerfall, “A metal heart is hard to tear apart.”

(Note: A part two with the way that music has influenced my writing will be coming in the near future.)