REDISCOVERING MUSIC

I've always absolutely loved music, I rarely leave the house without my very old and very full iPod touch and since moving Brussels and living by myself there is hardly a second of my time alone when music isn't playing. However, it occurred to me today that my attitude to music has changed a lot as I've grown up and I've only recently really rediscovered my love of music.

But before we get to the rediscovery, let's lay some ground works. My Dad is a music fanatic, our house is stacked full of records and CDs. He's had iPod classics and full iTunes libraries for as long as they've been around, and some of my strongest memories are linked to him and his music. Whether it was listening to Somebody Told Me and laughing at the lyrics which were so ridiculous to my 8 year old mind, or filling the long four hour drives to visit family by taking it in turn to chose music. There was nothing I loved more than getting playlists or album recommendations from him, or spending hours scrolling through his iTunes and copying all the music over to my own personal collection (which is mainly just stolen from him). He's a big fan of your classic Dad indie music, New Order, Elbow, Nick Cave etc. Before this, much to his disdain I lived for my Auntie's mixtapes which included anything from Kylie to SClub to Lion King, any classic cheesy pop and she was all over it- including buying me Girls Aloud and Sugababe's greatest hits and fueling my love of pop music. Dispersed throughout this was my childhood best friend's influence, she was so cool to me as she was the youngest of 4 kids and taught me my first swear words along with introducing me to Usher and Alicia Keys. Suffice to say, my musical tastes before the age of about 14 lacked direction and were fairly eclectic as I just absorbed whatever was given to me. The only real album I can remember discovering (around age 11) and adoring was Amy Winehouse's Back to Black, which remains one of my favourite album to this day.

Then fourteen year old was was obsessed with appearing as indie as possible and along with some questionnable fashion decisions came a love of (mainly mainstream) indie music, I'm talking The Smiths, Arctic Monkeys, Foals, etc etc. I went to gigs all the time, plastered my room in cutouts and posters from NME and listened religiously to Nick Grimshaw on the radio. I fell into a bit of an indie cliche as most of the music stemmed from the 500 Days of Summer soundtrack. The artists I fell in love with around this age have still stuck with me to this day, I've seen Foals and the Arctic Monkeys live 3 times now and loved it every single time. I'm still so excited for everything Foals put out, having followed them from their first album (I liked them before they were cool). Then from about 16 or 17 I just slowly stopped listening to new music, it didn't really interest me, NME seemed (as still does seem) pretentious and try hard and I was just kind of done. I still listened to music, and I still followed my favourite artists but just any interest slowly died away.

And then I went to uni. It was my second year that my eyes were really opened to the world of music again, this was really helped by the fact that three of my best friends wrote for and now run the uni music magazine. So through them I fell back in love with music. I now had friends who liked the same music as I liked, I had friends I could talk in depth with about music, we went to gigs together. I didn't just look forward to new, indie, undiscovered music but I went back, I looked to the 60s and the 80s and everything in between. I fell in love with Otis Reading (my housemates can attest to the fact that I listened to nothing but him for about a year), I rediscovered my younger love of Dolly Parton and Dusty Springfield. I listened to whole albums from artists, such as Paul Simon, I'd otherwise just known the standout singles from. I started making monthly roundups of new music I'd discovered. I now spend more time finding new music, rediscovering old favourites and I'm looking further back into what came before. I'm now excited to listen to music, and I love it again.

Some of my all-time faves: Laura Marling Amy Winehouse, Foals, Joni Mitchell, Beyonce.
Currently listening to a lot of: Bon Iver, Slaves, Jonny Flynn.

hello, again

So it's September, oops. Where did the last 4 months go? Let's briefly play catch up.

My last post was about a lovely day in Liverpool in April, since then I've been to Iceland, Dublin and America. I've sat (and passed!) all my exams, I've moved out of my uni house, worked abroad for 7 weeks and am now preparing to move abroad a bit more permanently.

Next week I'm off to Brussels for 3 days with Liverpool Young Labour to see the European Parliament, then I'm back for a week for my brother's 18th and then I'm moving to Brussels to study until the end of January. It seems I'm hardly ever at home these days, so I'm enjoying my time here for the time being. I'm squeezing in boring things like eye-tests and dentist appointments but also making the most of seeing home friends before we all go separate ways to start either our years abroad or final years of uni- when did we all get quite so grown up?!

I'm doing that thing all year abroad students do, I've decided to start blogging about my experiences, because of course you absoultely need another slightly pretentious languages student telling you how life-changing and eye-opening getting drunk in a dodgy european bar is. I do have slightly romantic (read: naive) ideas about how fabulous the year of my life is going to be, which are based largely on many films watched during my a-levels. But before we get to that I need to tackle the minor issue of finding somewhere to live. Stay tuned to see if I end up homeless for the next 5 months...