July, 2008

You must be my lucky star

It began with Madonna. Her first two albums penned the music DNA in my soul – Lucky Star! Holiday! Like A Virgin! By album number three I had moved on; I would listen to the radio on a Sunday night  – a soul show, can’t remember the DJ now – and record all the songs onto a cassette tape, trying not to tape any of the DJ’s waffle at the end of each song. This ritual soon evolved into making mixtapes from my favourite LPs, the soul of Anita Baker and Alexander O’Neal gradually upgraded to Chaka Khan, Janet Jackson (ha!), then Soul II Soul, before I turned goth and got into The Damned (this was a brief but melancholic phase, swiftly followed by a Joni Mitchell renaissance that continues to this day in my love of folk music).

Rave and acid house, and all that came with that in the early 90s, was, I now realise, to be hugely influential on my future musical tastes. From those soulful beginnings it was ambient and dance music that set me alight, thanks to The Orb, The Happy Mondays, The Beloved, Jesus Jones, The Shamen, The Prodigy and 808 State.

My sister and I were talking about the differences in our musical tastes the other day – how those couple of years between us in age meant that I got into the rave scene and she in turn was pulled towards the indie music scene. We share all our music, and while there are plenty of gems we both adore, I’ll still send her CDs of “dance-y crap” while she in turn sends me “miserable slitty-wrist shit”. Oh, how we laugh :-) I think my musical tastes can be summed up thus: ambient-folk-dance-funk-indie-Mozart-Bach-Gorecki. A bit of everything, then (I own one Spice Girls song, but I don’t like to talk about that too much).

I told her yesterday that I was feeling the need for some ROCK, some noisy powerful music to help me get my arse in gear, and, just like magic, this morning i received her latest CDs: half of Led Zeppelin’s back catalogue (yeah!) and a disc entitled Susie’s School of Rock, with everything from Rage Against the Machine and Foo Fighters to Faith No More and Muse. {you really do rock, sister… I love you millions}

All of this is to say that music heals me, music comforts and uplifts me. When my head is so full of chatter and scorn, plugging myself into music will drown out the doubting voice. I look back on the blackest periods of the recent past and I see how silent those times were, how I forgot how to help myself with the things that work. These days I’m listening to music non-stop, as I navigate all that I have to do to start writing the next chapter of this story. The anxiety is building and I’m having to pull all my energy inside me so I don’t lose my focus.

So, every single day I thank the universe for eyes that see, ears that hear and for iTunes and iPods, true mixtape heaven. I’ve uploaded some new musical Prozac for you here – what music plays in your soul? Tell me some hot recommendations.