[Part I] // [Part II]

They say you were something in those formative years…

For many, our love of music begins with the influence of our family and friends. I can remember my mom blasting Hendrix so loud the windows shook and I could feel it through the stool I was sitting on. Or hunched by the kitchen window watching the spread of milky coldness on the glass while my father cooked with Paul Simon singing “Mother and Child Reunion”. Still later, I would remember my brother buying Bon Jovi patches for his denim jacket.

There does come a time when something we hear goes beyond our inheritance. When I consciously chose an artist that no-one else championed, it changed what music did for me — it became an expression of my personality. Musical taste, to me anyway, is sometimes an instinctual compass that unlocks a part of who we are. These are some stories about those moments, as told by our contributor team. –fog

U2

It’s 2005. 2006? The exact year doesn’t matter. I’m 9, maybe 10 years old, and clearly don’t know much about how the world works, but I harbor an unquenchable need — as the oldest child in my family, as the son of a teacher and a preacher, as someone with all the love and support you could ask for, Maslow’s first three needs safely met — to present myself as smart. It’s a futile exercise, trying to look wise when you’ve barely scratched double digits, but at that age you either don’t know any better, or you know that “liking the right things” will at least marginally improve people’s impressions of you. In my house, the values of altruism and compassion were gospel; my parents left me plenty of seized room for childish indulgence, but I found myself asking unwieldy questions early, like when my godfather, a family friend I was close to, lost his struggle with muscular dystrophy. Like when I was diagnosed with painful chronic illnesses of my own not long after. Like when my folks, faultlessly loving as they were to me, began visibly falling out of love with each other. Concepts of the afterlife, of disease, of divorce, they should be adult matters. I didn’t necessarily have the luxury of waiting to be impacted by them.

It’s 2005 or 2006. The exact year doesn’t matter. I’m 9, maybe 10 years old, and I don’t know how the world works, but I know it contains hope, and I know it contains hurt. As my folks explained, there isn’t always an explanation for who receives which and when, but still, I wanted to understand.

“I woke up at the moment when the miracle occurred
Heard a song that made some sense out of the world”

This story has protagonists and antagonists. The lines between them often blur, and this is natural; one such hero here willingly goes by ‘The Edge.’ Naturally, the main baddie I’ll refer to as ‘Kevin,’ because that was his name, the absolute dork. Kevin and I met at school and shared similar interests, such as sports, which neither of us were that good at; video games, which compensated for our lack of athleticism; and music, where we were hardly alone in our appreciation of 2000s alternative rock radio. Fascinations with Linkin Park, Breaking Benjamin, and Green Day quickly arose within my social circle and I piggybacked my way into loving each of those groups. I hadn’t been exposed to music so (sic) heavy before, but I also didn’t necessarily mind what I had been exposed to through my parents; my father’s reverence for the likes of Springsteen, The Alarm, Rush, and more left CDs scattered throughout our house and the backseat of his car. My eyes eventually fixated on one whose name I’d heard through the radio as well: U2.

My father played me some of their hits, and I enjoyed them about as much as any surface-level 10-year-old listener of turn-of-the-century radio rock would. He went on to explain Bono’s philanthropic aspirations and I took for granted that those were good uses of fortune and fame. As an avid concert-goer of theirs, my dad also stressed that, for as slick as studio recordings can be, U2 were an act you really had to see live to “get;” eager to keep my curiosity stoked, he bought their then-most recent DVD, Vertigo 2005: Live from Chicago, and encouraged we watch it together. I asked him to hold off for a little while; Kevin was coming to sleep over later that month, and I assumed, since we were two peas in a pod, he would appreciate all the same attributes in the music that I did. When the evening finally came, I was blown away twice over; first, when the band took the stage, and I got to witness for the first time just how immersive a spectacle state-of-the-art rock concerts could be. The band’s passion was boundless, their showmanship captivating. It looked effortlessly cathartic; if the AMV-core my friends fancied was “heavy,” then this was dazzling in its lightness, jubilant, alive with the spirit of the church of rock and roll.

I was also blown away when I finally severed my attention to glance at Kevin a half-dozen songs in, his eyes glazed over, as he casually requested we put on something else because he was bored.

In the year of our Lord two-thousand-five-and/or-six, Kevin’s dismissiveness shook me. I didn’t know anyone (and by that, I mean the adults in my life and faceless radio hosts) who didn’t at least sort of like this band. They were everywhere then — and I reckon part of the problem is they’ve tried to stay everywhere since. It’s 2023 now. U2 have long since become synonymous with ill-conceived marketing gaffes and idealistic liberalism. Rock in general is absent from the current musical zeitgeist; add their brand of self-important, tone-deaf (if well-intentioned) activism and that’s a no-go for most discerning eyes and ears. Kevin’s criticism was insubstantial, but it was the tip of an anti-hype iceberg that only grew more imposing as the band’s career dragged on and they outran the causes they felt obliged to champion — not to mention the spark they once harnessed as an emotional tour-de-force. This story has protagonists and antagonists. The lines between them often blur.

Still, I consider U2 to be my most formative artist for a few reasons: on the shallowest of levels, they were the first time I became obsessed with a musical act. That interest waxed and waned for a decade on, but at each step of my musical development, I traced my roots back to them until I was familiar with their history and discography inside and out, discovering elements I wouldn’t have been able to explain but subconsciously appreciated even in my youth — how airtight Adam and Larry’s rhythmic work was, laying down the cement for the rest of the group’s sonic architecture. How The Edge’s pedal wizardry transformed simple arpeggiations and chords into three-dimensional wonders. How Bono, bless his heart, belted love songs and Biblical lamentations alike with full conviction (unless an on-stage persona called for something else, in which case he played each role perfectly). How the band stayed intact with neither addition nor subtraction for verging on 45 years now, and how their own divergent musical curiosities affected their direction, especially through the late ’80s and adventurous ’90s. They shattered my expectations of what any band could stand for or even do, and with what finesse they could regularly do it. Their stature seemed superhuman. Pride cometh, I suppose…

But as their future appears stagnant, their influence lives on, reflected in the subsequent artists I’ve come to cherish for similar reasons. I see U2’s intersectional reckoning of faith, politics, and morality reflected by so many bands from the aughts’ post-hardcore explosion, for instance. Whether they were a direct inspiration or not, Thrice’s inquiries, mewithoutYou’s testimonies, Brand New’s fear and trembling and so on emerged with similar rebelliousness from humble beginnings, charting their own topsy-turvy paths through genre barriers and crises of conscience while crafting dynamic, evocative, unforgettable songs and records in the process. Those other bands don’t necessarily play second fiddle to me in terms of their impact and how I walk on through life (or about songwriting in general, because as Johnny has reminded me on at least two occasions, “This is a music website”), but U2 was where I first connected with the concept of admiring music as a personal beacon instead of merely a cultural commodity, offering condolences through life’s lows and spreading joy through its highs. You don’t have to love U2, but I’d encourage you — now that I know a thing or two about the world — to find some art you can revere with equivalent intimacy, even if the people making it eventually let you down or the Kevins of the world write you off for your sincere appreciation. Maybe they just haven’t found what they’re looking for. Every story has protagonists and antagonists. The lines between them often blur. –ashcrash9

Marty Robbins

The highways of Ohio. Even the phrase reeks with tedium. Once a month, my military reserve parents would have drill weekend, and would drive us an hour and a half away to our grandparents on Friday. To a 6 year old boy, the drive was like waiting for a drop of pitch to finally fall. The endless stretching horizon, gentle hills and rusted out railways were scant food for a starved imagination. Any charm that all those vast, green farms and brightly painted small towns might have was lost on a kid who just wanted to jackknife into the unfettered hedonism of all the endless cartoons and sugary garbage that we weren’t allowed at home. And with those thoughts and anticipations like needles in our brains, we waited for the ride to end. And waited.

I don’t know whose idea it was to bring a cassette tape of Marty Robbins’ greatest hits along one month. I think I may have discovered it among all the ’60s Rock, Soul and Broadway cassettes my mom collected — maybe the only tangible musical evidence of my dad’s affinity for country music. Not that there weren’t other signs; besides the prints of Frederic Remington paintings and his VCR tapes of Will Rogers doing rope tricks, he’d often pace the floor in the evening while we played, quietly humming tunes that only years later I’d recognize as old Hank Williams.

If he had any misgivings about sharing the tape, I don’t remember hearing them. In fact, I don’t really remember asking him: I could usually rely on mom to be the parent least likely to say “no” about something.

I remember, though, first hearing “El Paso” and being instantly seized by the song, gripped by an atmosphere I’d never known existed, moreso by the story that the song was telling. Throughout the tranquilizing haze of that trip, I imagined myself as the narrator of the song, put myself into the boots of the cowboy on his blazing death ride to Felina, and all the doomed desire and dramatic throes setting my six year old imagination on fire.

The same with the other songs on the album — the morally upright Rangers standing up against hardened killers, the world-weary lament of a dying man on the streets of Laredo, the parched cry of someone aching for water in the desert. Marty didn’t just sing songs, he told stories, his melodies dropping you into dusty Helldorados and John Ford vistas as well as any movie could, because you hung onto his every word as he spun those yarns, his melodies as effective a vehicle for his vision as celluloid was for Leone. So the long miles stretched off into something a little more palatable as we sat and placed ourselves in the boots of those mythical grunt-and-spit hard-living archetypes of a past that’s become so entangled with myth there’s no way of knowing what’s fact and what’s just Romance in the grand sense. It was all a little more formative than I realized at the time, the idea that it didn’t matter if it was fact or fiction, but that this was the way it should have been.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems clearer that romanticizing some mythical past obscures realities that probably shouldn’t be neglected, buries stories and shunts aside the less comfortable truths of a particular era. And seeing the mess that the culture of rugged individualism has led to puts the lie to many of the assumptions of the old cowboy archetype. But maybe it’s possible to evaluate these myths of the Western Hero, which have become deeply uncomfortable in their chauvinist connotations, for what they aspire to, rather than what they obscure. The main idea in “El Paso” — that a man should be driven to such desperation that he’d face death in a hail of bullets just to look at the woman he desires — it all says something deep and tragic and genuine about human nature, that it’s easy to forget when nearly any desire can be cheaply repackaged and left at our fingertips. And really, those rugged individuals that Robbins is lauding are, at their best, acting in the name of the greater good, not the mean egotism of the “I’ve got mine” attitude so prevalent today. So, to this day, when I listen to those gunfighter ballads, I allow myself those rose-colored glasses for a few minutes, not for the sake of neglecting those unjustly obscured voices, but for the reminder that there are, and can still be, ideas that give a solidity to life, an anchor in all the frenzied, empty churn of the world that makes all the banality not just bearable, but in its way a good in itself. To quote another cowboy’s epitaph, albeit one of the space variety: “You’re gonna carry that weight.” –DadKungFu

Linkin Park

Whenever people ask me (a clean-cut-looking Jewish dude) how I got into all that “screamy, harsh stuff,” I always just tell them that, as a learning drummer, I wanted to find the fastest, craziest and loudest drumming I could find. There is truth to that answer, but the real story is something I have kept to myself for a long time.

I was raised to be respectful and considerate of others. I have tried my hardest to be nice to people and treat them positively. Despite my somewhat antagonistic outward appearance, I’ve never been much of a fighter. If I got into an argument with someone, I would always be the one to try and handle it, even if I wasn’t in the wrong. I found that I liked treating people well, and I have found that no matter how stupid it is, I can never get past naïvely trying to make the best out of things. Unfortunately, in my youth, the good will I exhibited towards others wasn’t always reciprocated, and as a result, I started dealing with severe self-esteem issues that I could never really talk about and never really have talked about.

It’s not that I didn’t have friends or people who liked me. I did. It’s just that I always had the gut feeling (true or not) that, when push came to shove, I would be the chubby, awkward kid that would get left behind in the dust. I could talk to people, hang out with people, but I couldn’t help constantly feeling like I was totally alone. I would battle with really awful thoughts about not being good enough, and more frighteningly, that I never would be good enough. In my mind, I was too ugly to date, too awkward to befriend, too strange to be around. My parents didn’t get it; they had both been social butterflies growing up. My friends didn’t get it, because I also refused to show what I considered to be my deepest weakness.

So all I had was a growing alienation from others and an increasing belief that I would never amount to anything, contrasted against parents who had high expectations for me, like I think any parents would (although mine did a pretty damned good job). I was twelve, going on thirteen, confused, trying to put on the best front possible while also hating everything about myself, the way I looked, how I acted around people, and how just overall backwards and strange I was.

That year, 2003, my parents decided to send me and my sister on a trip to Israel by ourselves to see our relatives. While that trip had its ups and downs, it happened to contain the moment I watched the music video for “Faint” in my cousin’s room in Tel-Aviv. I did know who Linkin Park were, and I had heard Hybrid Theory, but I had been too young to understand its significance. With “Faint,” though, the amount of primal energy I felt from hearing Chester screaming, “You’re gonna listen to me, like it or not, right now,” was something I hadn’t experienced. I had no idea what was going on; I only knew that I liked it. I wanted more of it. I wanted to feel understood in a way that nobody else could.

After having “Faint” stuck in my head for the entirety of my trip, I begged my parents to buy me Meteora immediately upon my return to the States. After a week of non-stop badgering, my dad finally took me to a local Barnes & Noble and bought it.

I listened to it three times in a row that night. I felt like I was spiritually connected to music, and there was a cathartic, almost visceral quality to letting out all of the aggression I was quietly building up inside. I mean, I was positively electric. In my room, when no one was home, I would put it on speaker as loud as possible (without disturbing the neighbors, of course) and run around, head-banging and shaking myself as violently as I could. As soon as I could play a drum beat, I was learning how to play this album, and as soon as I could play the songs, I was playing them as hard and as loud as I could. I would listen to it in the car on the way to school, on school recesses, in the car home, late at night while pretending to sleep. Every waking moment was spent with this album playing as often as it could in my ears.

It made me feel alive.

It wasn’t just that Linkin Park combined catchy hooks with chunky riffs or something like that — it was also the passion, it was Mike Shinoda’s ability to take melodic music and inject it with pessimistic anger, it was Chester Bennington screaming his lungs out about his own insecurities and fears, it was all the frustration and anguish of life written out on a wall for everyone to see — and an invitation to those lost souls who didn’t think they had any hope to try and find some.

It was the first time that music of any sort had captured my heart and made me feel understood. It was my introduction to the uplifting and rewarding power music has as a catalyst for emotional gratification. I still struggled throughout my teenage and early adult years, but I could take all of the pain and insecurity I felt and translate it into playing music. All of the bottled up anger and despair had a place to go, and as the years went by, I slowly grew more accepting of myself and more able to develop social skills and deal with people, and all of it because I knew that, no matter where I went or what I was dealing with, I would always find solace in music.

Fortunately, I have been able to (mostly) overcome those feelings of severe inferiority and become the person I’ve wanted to be. I found a career with which I am truly happy. I met and married the most beautiful girl I have ever known, and eleven years after our first date, I’m still madly in love with her. I found friends — real ones. Sometimes I still find myself in a state of anxiety about my worth, but the feeling quickly dissipates. I’m actually a pretty happy person, and truly if it weren’t for my being able to pull myself out of that deep, dark place I was digging myself into, I don’t know where I would be today. While Chester sadly left this world after being unable to find his own peace, in my eyes he earned his keys to the gates of heaven, his entrance pass into Valhalla, his escape from rebirth in nirvana, his constellation in the sky, or whatever you choose to believe. I hope he’s found the happiness he wanted so badly wherever he’s gone; I hope he could finally do for himself what he did for me. –Manatea

[Part I] // [Part II]