Monday, August 13, 2012

My life soundtrack!

My lovely friend Bryce sent me a message a few months ago suggesting that I create a "playlist" or soundtrack to my life to date.  Ironically, this was also on my 101 list (#78)! I have been thinking about this for some time and I think it makes most sense to break it up into periods of time in my life.  Here are the first 10 songs that tell the story of my life through high school:

Beautiful Day- U2

            So it begins…  Life at birth is easy.  Everyone loves you and is excited that you have arrived.  “What you don't have you don't need it now.  What you don't know you can feel it somehow” Additionally, the line “After the flood all the colors came out” has become a motto in my life.  Bono is a freaking genius!

            This is a song that has always reminded me of my childhood.  I was always wishing I could wake up in another reality and find that my problems and troubles weren’t nearly as bad and that I could be a carefree child again.  Plus it’s a song that embodies hope- something I needed without knowing how much I needed it.
           
            When I was little, I had big brown eyes.  My mom used to sing this song to me when I was sad or upset.  It would always make me smile and before you knew it, we would be dancing.

            The opening lines get me every time… “What a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty girl”.  It blows me away how each child is born into this world just wanting to be loved and there are too damn many things in this world that take that away.  I wake up scared, I wake up strange. I wake up wondering if anything in my life is ever going to change”.

            Another song I would listen to as I tried to fall asleep as a kid.  I feel like this song embodies who I wanted to be as a child.  I wanted to be that little girl who ran so freely around in fields of wild flowers.  I wanted to love with reckless abandonment.  Instead I was forced to enter adulthood by the time I was 5 years old.  Due to the upheaval of being a child of divorce, trust and love did not come easy for me.

            I listened to this song over and over again when I was in junior high/high school.  I prayed that someone would save me from my life, make the rain stop.  I just needed someone to hold me and tell me it was okay to cry.  Around this time in my life, I became a follower of Jesus.

            Song is all about growing up in a small town. Small town USA is my home town!

            I was born country and this country is what I love.  I guess I will always be a country girl 

            The girl in this song is who I was in high school.  I struggled to find my self-worth in a high-functioning culture and society that made it easy to escape these issues by performance (athletics and academics) and pleasing other people.  These are the lyrics that are most descriptive to how I felt in high school: “She prays one day she'll find someone to need her/She swears that there's no difference/Between the lies and compliments/It's all the same if everybody leaves her/And she would change everything, everything just ask her/Caught in the in between, a beautiful disaster, And she just needs someone to take her home/She's giving boys what they want, tries to act so nonchalant, Afraid they'll see that she's lost her direction/She never stays the same for long, Assuming that she'll get it wrong/Perfect only in her imperfection.

            The end of high school meant leaving Montana and everything it represented.  I could leave the bad memories and take the good as I moved onto Portland.  This song was played over and over again during the summer after graduation, so it felt natural to put it here as a transition.




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

All great songs! And that Green Day song is an old one, but still a favorite :) I live in Portland as well and my time here has been full of nothing but wonderful memories.

xo, samantha
sammyblackwood.com

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