Calliope's Muse
Nostalgia has always had a profound effect on me, to the point where I am unable to objectively discern "good" from "bad". Case in point: as I sit here with my morning tea, sifting through the organizational nightmare that is my iTunes library, trying to build a road trip playlist for next week, one in every few tracks conjures up a fond memory. Sometimes the memory is concrete; I can't pass up The Doors without thinking of driving around town in the summer of 2005, sixteen and newly-licensed, staying out past curfew, blasting "Light My Fire" through the overworked car stereo. Sometimes I just feel an ephemeral warm fuzziness; Damien Rice's "Cannonball" plaintively wailing about a time in my life when my main musical influence was Seth Cohen from "The OC". The tracks themselves may or may not be aligned with my current musical tastes, but that is beside the point. And lest I digress into a soapbox-mounting sermon on the intricate subtleties of subjectivity in music, which I shall save for another time (perhaps when I've imbibed something a bit stronger than tea), I will simply reiterate that taste goes out the window when nostalgia comes into play.
A garage punk band from St. Louis that I was certain I had "discovered" (not to brag, but I was a hipster before it was cool. Then I came to my senses). An electronic mix made by an ex-boyfriend, back in the nascence of autotune. An alt-rock track that I would blast every morning as an alarm during college, which I'm sure drove my roommate crazy. None are necessarily musically good or bad, but all fall into the same category of "This song played a role in my personal development, therefore it is good".
So, needless to say, this playlist is quickly turning into an aural representation of the show "Hoarders".