sarah eve kelly

(This is where you say, “Your man Animal from the Muppets.”)

I was listening to “Hyperballad” this morning, which is a song that Colby put on a mixed tape for me in the summer of 1997 when I was leaving town for a while, the strange, fraught summer when I was eighteen, and could buy cigarettes in Alberta, but not in BC. In any case, while listening, I had a familiar feeling of being something of a fraud, which comes when you realize that none of your musical tastes is your own.

I have never “discovered” an artist and decided I liked him or her, or them, and gone out and bought one of their albums. With the exceptions of Tori Amos in 1993, Dar Williams in 1996, and Rufus Wainwright in 2001. Right now I’m listening to “Circles” by Soul Coughing, which is a song I heard in RATT in ‘97 or ‘98 and decided I liked, but I was wrong: I got the album El Oso and hated every single track but this one.

The best of my tastes, the ones that make me happiest, lie with artists who were introduced to me by either a concerned friend or someone I wanted to impress. Actually, that’s not true: a lot of them come simply from growing up in the family I grew up in - Fleetwood Mac, the Rolling Stones, Leo Kottke, Paul Simon, and Leonard Cohen were all byproducts of being around my mom, my dad, and my aunt Jody and uncle Chris (I drove Jody crazy with Graceland one summer).

My first real boyfriend had a tremendous influence on my musical taste. He played bass and was in a band of his own and knew what was Out There. Talking Heads, They Might Be Giants, Pink Floyd (old Floyd), David Bowie, all of it - I’m conversant now because of his careful ministrations. He and his group of friends were ever-so-slightly punkish without meaning to be - or perhaps I mean that they wanted to be but fell short of it because they were kinder and more aware - and I lost that when I lost him, and that music is what I was able to take away.

When I was eighteen and nineteen I was able to saturate the bulk of what my musical taste is now; there hasn’t been much change since then. And I don’t even remember anything extraordinary happening then: I think that a point comes when people close themselves off to new music, and I’m past that point now, and I suppose that means I’m getting old. But just before you hit that point, you’re at your most open, and when I was eighteen, I rediscovered the eighties and continue to love just about anything that came from them, although I was in single digits for most of it and remember almost none of it first-hand (I say “almost” because my mom is a huge Michael Jackson fan). I don’t like the hair bands, but the pop - Tears for Fears, Modern English, Big Country and most especially XTC - that I love.

Did you know that the eighties aren’t cool anymore? What idiots the trendsetters are.

It was during that time that I heard “Hyperballad” for the first time. One friend introduced me to the Sugarcubes and another to Bjork proper, and it was through them that I began to love Britpop, too.

My favorite song throughout all this has been “Suzanne” by Leonard Cohen, and that won’t change, or I’ll know that I’ve lost too much of myself.

Since I was nineteen, I choose my music the way I “choose” my friends. I’m actually extremely close-minded, you know: one more way to be like the Virgin Queen, I suppose. I make a truly close, lifelong friend about once every three or four years and I often can’t be bothered with the rest of it. I didn’t use to be like that, but hey, I had crappier friends back then too.

And now I’ve posted. It’s ridiculous, but I don’t have time to post at work anymore, so evenings and weekends it’ll have to be. Hope some of you are still out there.

Related posts:

1. so who’re your influences (redux)
2. a compact chronology
3. another summer, another folkfest far from my home