This is the project I have wanted to do forever. It’s something that’s been sort of chomping away at the creative part of my brain for several years. I started in the middle originally, but it seemed weird. It seemed like the most predictable kind of Tarantino movie, and it was a terrible idea from the get go to even try to replicate/compare anything I have done to a Tarantino movie. That’s not why we are here. We are here to get nostalgic, emo, and real all at once. That’s what this fucking project is all about: milking the past through the most menial events of my adolescence.

Let me explain. My young life was nothing short of relatively average and nice on the surface. I grew up in a small, slice of apple pie, Stephen King type of American town. There were 4th of July fireworks, Memorial Day parades, a bland educational system, some playgrounds, summer extras curricular programs for kids, hiking trails, and a couple small bodies of water to swim in. Most of my childhood was spent riding a bike around the neighborhood, and loving whatever Disney showed me on TV. Nothing was drastically controversial about it.

My parents never divorced. Nobody ever hurt me in any profoundly fucked up way. I understand things like that are massive blessings amidst the sick world we live in. I know by even admitting to this, I could sway a number of readers from ever wanting to press onward and we are only 3 paragraphs deep. This isn’t always the best idea. However, fuck it, I don’t want to lead people on to believe somehow through this memoir that spans six years of my adolescent life will have some sort of big traumatic event that will turn me into the person I become and that story will be harrowing and juicy. That’s not what’s going to happen here. What will happen is a lot of reading about old computer software, bad internet connections, girls who wouldn’t slow dance with me, friends who came in and out of my life, skate videos, smoking weed, lonely Friday nights, and driving around in a car aimlessly.

That’s just the background noise though, this is all about the music.

Over the years, I have seen the world and met lots of people from all over. If one thing has bound me with total strangers, it’s music. We all have seen physical proof of this whether it be a poster of Jimi Hendrix playing at Woodstock, or being deep in the crowd at Bonnaroo waiting for Phish to come on stage. You find yourself looking at these posters, or being in these crowds and thinking, “Wow, there are SO MANY people here, how is it this one artist is able to have the same effect on all these people the way they do on me?” It’s never been fully explained other than music has an ability to turn us into people that don’t exist anymore.

We’ve all seen one parent get drunk, put on some record from their teenage years and suddenly become a sentimental fool. We’ve all seen the older people still throwing down in the mosh pit like their bodies aren’t going to ache the next day. We’ve all seen it because we all mirror those things too. If you put on the right song, I will suddenly be whisked back to whenever that song was the most important thing in my life, and at some point they all were. That’s what this project is about.

Now that doesn’t mean there won’t be exciting stories along the way. The whole reason this project has been on my brain for so long is because of my old roommate, Peter (shoutout to Peter). Most mornings over coffee, we would tell random anecdotes about life. Some were current. Some were about what we saw on the news. But a handful were my own personal history ranging from playing in a middle school pop punk band, to hiding from the police in the woods to avoid a FELONY marijuana charge. One day he told me, “Man, you’d better write all these stories down, you are going to forget them later in life.”

He had a point. I should write these down, but I never wanted to just rant and rave about the glory days like fucking Bruce Springsteen. The older I get, the more embarrassed I get at my behavior during my teenage years. Let’s paint a picture of my time as a teenager. We begin in 6th grade. I have no fashion sense. My mom picks out my clothes. Talking to girls is damn near impossible as I am an emotional wreck (for no reason at all other than being a hyperactive nerd), and being a rebel is hard with my parents breathing down my neck, because you know, I’m a 12 year old. 7th grade comes and I get a little more fashion sense. I have now kissed a girl so I understand SOME things, but not all of them. My cousin consistently tries to show me what’s up and my next door neighbor introduces me to punk and skateboarding. I am in a band, but all we do is cover Nirvana. Nu-metal slowly fades from the cultural zeitgeist, and pop-punk/emo become the only things that matter. 8th grade comes and I start to find myself. It’s cool, my band plays more music, girls talk to me, I am voted class clown, and I can play “Stairway to Heaven” on guitar in full. Then BOOM! None of that matters, I’m a freshman and don’t have a cooler older sibling to provide me a rep, or a ride to school. Not only that, people no longer care about pop punk and sugar, but hip-hop and partying. I am left in the dust, so I dive into more classic rock, and 80s hardcore. My friends all turn on me, and then by 10th grade I have a different group of friends, and love hip-hop, partying and skateboarding (again). Outkast is on top of the world and the Strokes are more than just a temporary fad. 10th grade is pretty cool. Weed takes me down some avenues like the Doors, Kottonmouth Kings, and Sublime. I also discover popular underground music exists in my very own home state. By 11th grade though, hip-hop is everything to me because now I can drive and the bass makes me feel really cool. I still can’t really talk to girls and I am known as the kid who always says outlandish things, plays guitar around school and has a video camera. Senior year rolls around and my group of friends has completely shifted again. I am still the class clown, and play Tenacious D in the hallways. I also am inexplicably obsessed with the Wu-Tang Clan.

But there was so much more to it than that. The music was what got me through it all, and allows me to dive deep into the catacombs of my memories.

See, aside from existing, skating and smoking pot, my hometown provided very little to do. In the early half, we were lucky if there was a school dance, or some sort of light social function to provide us with a reason to leave the house. Often times, there wasn’t anything. You’d just hang out at home, or at a friend’s house and entertain yourselves. Downloading music on the internet became a great way to pass the time. There was no goal (although sometimes there was) for the night, but you would always be able to either find the coolest songs you’d been searching for, funny skits that were dangerous to play around your parents, or weird underground stuff that turned out to actually be really good. That was the thing, the biggest threat was a virus, but the biggest potential was something that would change your life forever.

As a kid, music had been pretty central to keeping me busy and sane. My fondest early childhood memories include me just straight up rocking out to Soundgarden and Green Day. I had dubbed cassettes from my older cousin and babysitter, and it was just those albums on repeat. I had no idea what the lyrics meant, but it didn’t matter. It was the feeling. They got me excited to live my life. By 3rd grade, my father showed me how to tape songs off the radio on my boombox. This became how I spent almost ALL my free time. I would sit in front of the radio all day waiting for that one song to come on, and then hit the RECORD button. Then I’d wear that tape out for all eternity. As time went on, I’d get a CD here and there, but they were fucking expensive. I can remember saving a month of allowance just to get the soundtrack to Batman and Robin, simply because I wanted TWO songs off it. It’s not that other songs on it weren’t good, but this was the only option you had back then. The radio wouldn’t play it and there wasn’t a single (which is actually how I did buy a handful of songs as a kid, since they were only a couple bucks). My only option was to buy it if I wanted to hear that Smashing Pumpkins song without watching the credits on TV.

The internet provided some help here though. In 5th grade, shortly after my love affair with a Billy Corgan song about George Clooney, my parents bought a brand new computer with internet access (a Dell with Windows 98 that had 50 GB of storage!). Many afternoons that summer had me scouring Yahoo for full length songs that I loved. I was obsessed with Blink 182 and the Offspring at this time, so I was constantly trying to find the full versions of certain songs. Both bands had websites where you could go and stream a number of their tracks on Real Player, which looking back was pretty cool for its’ time. However, I wanted to just listen to those songs on their own. I didn’t want to have to log onto dial-up internet, find this website, and stream from Real Player any time I wanted to hear “Dammit.”

That’s why the biggest revelation in my life happened on the weekend before 6th grade ended. For whatever reason, we were at my aunt and uncle’s house for a BBQ. This was not unusual, they lived a half hour away and we spent many free weekends with one another because your time is your parent’s time until you develop a small sense of independence. My three cousins were blessed with one thing we were consistently envious of: cable internet. At the time, they had it and we were still in ancient times with dial-up. It was a nightmare. Their internet was so fast and didn’t tie up the phone line, while mine was slow and would often be interrupted by my mother needing to make a work related call. On this day though, they had this cool new thing we had been reading about in the newspaper.

It was called Napster. Some tech cool guy named Sean Fanning had apparently written the code in a bar in Boston somewhere and then went back to his dorm to create a program that would change the face of the music industry forever. It was the first real way to download songs en masse and share with other users. This meant small time bands suddenly had a platform to get their music out on, and you could get songs by famous artists one at a time rather than buy CDs or spend hours waiting on the radio. This became the crux of our teenage existence. You’d download a bunch of songs (slowly – since our town only had dial-up), and then you’d go over to your friend’s house and see what THEY downloaded. Sometimes you’d show one another special songs the other hadn’t heard yet, sometimes you’d bond over songs you both had. This became standard protocol for hanging out from then on. It was also the era of AOL Instant Messenger, so there would inevitably be a point when you were sitting in front of a computer. That was your cue to pull up the songs and ask any of your friends if they had heard this, or downloaded that.

Then things went even further.

For one week that same summer, my cousin Sam, who was one month younger than I, stayed at our house. This was unprecedented, prior to this the most we’d ever spent together was a weekend. However, he brought with him the most legendary artifact in our lives, Chunkorama: the first mix CD I had ever seen. Sure, I had made my mixtapes off the radio all those years prior, but this was a CD! He made it with all the music that he downloaded off Napster, which included a lot of things that would inevitably wind up on MY first mix CD. And thus the cycle began. My cousin was arguably the most important person in all this. He, and a select group of friends, would be the people I’d spend countless hours in front of the computer with downloading songs, talking to girls online, and just using those moments and conversations to somehow contribute to our own self discovery. This was our entire world when we weren’t out and about. We’d show each other the music that would go on to define one another, and to be quite honest, I don’t think it could ever go back to being such a group oriented yet intimate thing like that again. I am sure kids will always be exchanging songs with one another, but everything is so immediate nowadays. The anticipation of waiting on songs to download, and eventually be burned was huge. Eventually, my father got us a CD burner for Christmas in 2000 and after that it was on.

Now, as stated before, I had started to write this project years and years ago but from the middle. All I had access to were the group of CDs that came into existence in 9th grade. I was happy to write about my high school years, but omitting the middle school era, where this literally was my whole life and not just a way to begrudgingly pass the time, seemed like bad form. That’s where the story starts, because while I painted the picture of a nerd going through different phases, this whole collective work is a massive transformation piece about finding myself, and hopefully, it can be a map for anyone else who feels or has ever felt lost in trying to do this.

6th grade was tough because I wasn’t just a goofy nerd who loved Pokemon, I was the laughing stock of my school for a brief moment when my whole class found out I took ballet lessons as a child. Sure, it was a one time thing (I did one recital with my neighbor and then quit), but it ruined me for awhile. Those first couple years of middle school were dark, as they typically are for most kids that age. But something happened in 8th grade where I suddenly felt confident, and even though some wrenches were thrown in the spokes in 9th grade, I still managed to continue to become happier with who I was for the last 3 years of school. Drugs may have helped, but the music always kept me grounded.

Some of these stories will be full of profound discovery about myself, the world at large, and how the lyrics of Tom Delonge, or Tupac Shakur, or Brad Nowell impacted my life in a way that forever changed my path. Some of these stories will be as simple as they are boring. That’s the point though. In one way or another, they all mattered. They all had an effect on me that led to this moment right now. It is forever perplexing the role music has played in my life, and to separate the two in my life story would be impossible. I chose the music, and the music made me.

I am no longer the guy going out always looking for cool new music, but I still feel these artists and songs constructed the blueprint of who I am at my core. These songs all kept me sane in times when I thought I was losing it, and provided me comfort when I was scared. They led me to people, experiences, and places that have forever lingered in my memory, and I want to preserve those individual memories. The only way they can be preserved accurately is with the music. So, here we go….