Category Archives: Music

High-Fiving My Subconscious DJ: A Music Experiment

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So, here’s the thing. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how I am constructing a musical autobiography using a public YouTube playlist in which I add songs that make up my story. Songs that might make me say, “That reminds me of Fall 2011,” etc., whether they’re songs that speak to me or just songs that I’ve been listening to a lot. I think many of us do that in our minds — associate music with different parts of our lives — but I wanted to take it a step further. That’s still in progress.

It’s been a long-standing joke among my friends that the song in my head changes quite frequently, and sometimes I truly can’t figure out why certain songs are stuck there when I haven’t heard them recently.

On Tuesday, I decided to live-tweet each song change.

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A Musical Autobiography Project

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Music has always fascinated me in the sense that it helps shape a collective story. Think about the different generational stories that are created by the sounds of performers from Benny Goodman to Buddy Holly; from The Doors to Nirvana; from The Beatles to the Backstreet Boys.

I recognize there are some tremendous leaps there. Those acts generated buzz and helped to shape their respective generations.

But music shapes our personal stories, too. I’ve always been the kind of person who can hear a song from my lifetime and figure out when it came out based on the events in my life to which I’ve attached it. For example, certain songs remind me of listening to the radio late at night in 4th grade when I suffered horrible bouts of insomnia. I would just lie awake and hear the same songs on the radio over and over again, night after night. The Bangles’ song “Walking Down Your Street” will always remind me of when I took that cassette tape to first grade and the sub turned it on and my whole class danced.

Or, for my inner circle, “If You Leave Me Now” by Chicago.

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Enjoy the Silence

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Yes, I did just reference Depeche Mode in my blog title.

I have, on several occasions, mentioned how I like to think. I won’t get into how that is sometimes not really a good thing, but I’ve been thinking about thinking, so I decided to write about it (at least to some extent).

As I type this, it has just turned 2:00 a.m. For my entire life, I have been somewhat nocturnal. I love the quiet and the peace of just enjoying time to myself when no one else is awake, and I use this time to do a lot of thinking and reflecting (and, in college, homework). Sometimes I take this time to collect my thoughts and process them into something that will resemble a coherent blog. Tonight is not one of those nights. This is Renee Unplugged. And speaking of Unplugged, there is music.

I’m sure that when I was in high school, I used to stay up late and listen to music. It’s always been such an integral part of my life that I can’t see how I wouldn’t have done that. In fact, most of the time, I would rather turn on iTunes than watch TV. It wasn’t really until I got to college, though, that I realized the pure joy that comes from just lying in a pitch black room, thinking to music.  Continue reading →