I got a pocket, got a pocketful of sunshine…
I grew up with music as the backdrop to everything. My bright yellow Sony Walkman was practically glued to me, playing homemade Elvis mixtapes or whatever cassettes my dad left lying around. In the car, it was a rotation between the “oldies” station (pretty sure it was 101.1, WCBS FM; I can still hear the jingle in my head), the popular music station (Z100!), or “car CDs” (usually boy band albums or Burmese songs). When I graduated to a Discman, I burned my own CDs with tracks ripped from Limewire, hoping the download didn’t nuke the family computer. I eventually moved up to an iPod — late to the game with a 5th gen, I think — suddenly carrying hundreds of songs in my pocket.
I carry music with me everywhere. Singing in the shower. Cooking dinner (I use the 10-minute version of “All Too Well” as a pasta timer). Flipping through radio stations and somehow knowing every song, even across totally different genres. Just the other day, I went seamlessly from The Corrs’ “Breathless” to T-Pain’s “I’m Sprung” to Michelle Branch’s “Everywhere”. My Red Rocks concert tees range from The Goo Goo Dolls to Teddy Swims to Anderson .Paak. I’m a millennial who can karaoke to Shania Twain just as well as Linkin Park. If I know it, even halfway, I’ll sing or hum along. Call it eclectic, call it range.
Music isn’t just background or entertainment for me. Music is how I reset. I try to start each morning with something playing, even if just for a song or two. There’s something cleansing about it, like it shakes the mental Etch A Sketch and lets me start fresh. Some days, it’s “Killing In the Name”. Other days, it’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You”. Either way, the music clears my head.
At least, it clears my head when lyrics aren’t fighting for attention. If I’m deep into writing or problem-solving, lyrics hijack my brain. I can’t focus on building my own sentences when a song is telling me a story. But instead of working in silence, I turn to lo-fi beats, instrumental tracks, or songs in languages I don’t understand. No words to trip me up — just rhythm and beats. Scaffolding for my brain, without distraction of catchy choruses I can sing along to. I’ve definitely typed song lyrics instead of status updates before…
Music tells the stories we cling to, the ones we belt out at concerts, the ones that bring us back to a car ride in 1999. I still remember the first time my dad blasted the Backstreet Boys’ Millennium CD through the car speakers. Twelve-year-old me hearing the intro to “Larger Than Life”, complete with AJ’s maniacal cackle. In the right moment, music and lyrics are belonging. In the wrong one, they’re just noise.
And that’s not just true in my AirPods; it’s true everywhere. Coffee shops use mellow acoustic tracks to make you linger. Bars crank up the bass to make nights feel electric. Restaurants fine-tune playlists to make meals more intimate, or more bumpin’, while supermarkets play the “oldies” to remind you you’re officially an adult shopping for milk and eggs. Music steers the vibe, whether or not we notice.
That’s why music feels so necessary to me: it teaches me to notice what I need. Do I want to feel nostalgic, to be swept in a memory? Or do I need the hum of background rhythm to stay present and focused? Side note: I often get stuck on deciding what my morning tunes are because I DON’T KNOW what I need. But that’s another story.
Today (including while writing this!), I spent hours with music in the background, mostly throwback J-Pop, and I felt more… regulated. Like I’d been tuned, back into myself.
Music doesn’t just accompany us. It shapes us, sometimes with words, sometimes without. The trick is knowing when to sing along, and when to let the lyrics fall away. Maybe that’s not just true for music, but for life too.
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