Featured Essay: A Musical Journey

by Michael O'Connell

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the role that appreciating music plays in my life. I feel like I’ve always been more plugged into the way that music imprints on my emotions and memories than most people are and in almost every instance of that phenomenon, I’m grateful that I’m wired that way. And as I get older and move through the different phases of my personal evolution, that attachment to music has never faded. So many of the touchstones of my life are songs or set to music and I can’t imagine that ever changing.  

My memories of listening to Philly soul music on a transistor radio under my pillow after I went to bed, starting when I was seven or eight are very clear and I still love the music from that period, which has been a source of joy and, more recently, sweet feelings of melancholy ever since. As I write this, “Oh Girl” by the Chi-Lites is playing via a Spotify playlist that the service created ‘just for me’ based on my listening habits. There’s something transcendent about that genre of music that opened the floodgates for my love of soul music and all of the other pop music genres that I later came to love and which still hold so much sway over my life. 

As I grew up a bit, my affinity for pop music just got stronger and helped me make sense of the changes that I was experiencing throughout my early adolescent years and then full-on puberty. Every time I hear “Best of My Love" by the Eagles, I think back to riding the morning elementary school bus where the driver always had a pop AM radio station (WABC?) playing, and the confusing experiences of my first crushes on Sandra B and Angela S that were being articulated by the singer. How was that possible? I didn’t know but I knew enough to go with it because the thrill was real and I had a suspicion that crushes were only going to get more thrilling as I got older and I would need some help figuring it all out. 

After we moved to Connecticut and my teenage alienation really took hold, the music that I loved often felt like my sole salvation. I spent most hours isolated in my room, diving deep into classic rock while spending far too much of my time outside the house at Trident Records near my school, where Charlie the owner and his sister whose name I can’t remember couldn’t have been nicer to the zit faced, greasy haired introvert that I was during that unhappy phase. By the time I started high school, I was much more interested in learning about the lives of the musicians in the (mostly English) bands that I was obsessed with than I was about any ignorant, provincial, jock classmates. 

When I was 15ish I was lucky enough to meet some kindred lost souls through my schoolmate LB and his friends Tom and Rob who introduced me to punk rock via Devo and the Ramones and changed my perspective on music forever. That music spoke to my restless soul in such an elemental way that I still get chills thinking about it today. Those Stratford guys had a punk band but more importantly they brought me to local punk shows in CT, while around the same time my off and on friend Philip’s older sister decided that we were cool enough to take along to the punk and new wave shows that she was going to in NYC and occasionally Boston. That time from early 1979 until I went away to college developed into a non-stop avalanche of exposure to the incredible new music scene that was exploding at the time. I couldn’t get enough of the live shows, the late night new music releases on WNEW, the fanzines that were such a staple of our world, and the incredible joy of finding a community among the misfits who weren’t cool enough to rock a mohawk or pierced nose but also couldn’t fit in with the straights, especially in my case the Fairfield County dorks. 

Like so many other parts of my life, it all came together for me with my music jones when I went to college. I knew the secret world of underground music that was just starting to rise to the surface via ‘college radio’ and so I could be the guide for my circle to become aware of the greatness of U2, REM, The Cars, and Blondie, followed soon after with The Replacements, Duran Duran, Haircut 100, Husker Dü and the many many great acts that emerged on the scene in the first part of the 80’s. And unlike almost everything else that I was trying to do at the time, my voracious appetite for music wasn’t a Trojan horse targeted towards picking up women. I loved making mixtapes for the girls I was with and DJing our parties but when it came to The Music I was a true believer and not even the lure of more romantic conquests could break through my devotion to the scene. 

That devotion is probably best captured in my decision to move to San Francisco in 1986 after making up my mind that I wanted to learn what living in California would be like. I was familiar by then with both the Bay Area and SoCal from having visited each multiple times and didn’t really have a preference for which part of the state to move to. But when Paul Westerberg sang ‘headed out to San Francisco, definitely not LA’ in “Left of the Dial", my choice was made for me. That was who I was - my allegiance to the muse, especially when it was being channeled through Paul (or Joe Strummer) was unquestioned and even if my SF experience was far from satisfying, I never second guessed the reason that I chose to go there.  

After that peak period, music blended into my ever-expanding life more than it drove it, but the power and sway it held over me didn’t really diminish. My early days living in Dallas were full of exposure to new musical genres and local Texas artists like Darden Smith and the Arc Angels that I loved at that time and whose songs still live with me. Of course my romance with M and eventually our marriage has its own soundtrack in the jukebox of my mind. My daughter went to a Dixie Chicks concert a couple of years ago and I told her the story of her mom and I listening to “Wide Open Spaces" when she was a newborn and imagining the adventurous life that she would have like the heroine of the song. The emotional feeling that stories like that continue to evoke in me, despite the trainwreck aspects of how so much of that marriage turned out, is still very sharp and very pure and I hope that never changes. 

In a similar way, the songs that will always remind me of my happy times with the women that I loved can be hard for me to listen to these days but they’re part of my life’s canon and I can’t ignore that. “I’ve Been Waiting,” “Sugar Magnolia,” “Heroes,” “This Must Be The Place,” “Only You,” and a few others aren’t just songs to me, they’re markers of what once was a deep feeling of love and attachment for those women that’s gone now but which will always become present again when I hear the songs. Sometimes that sucks and sometimes it’s ok but, regardless, in those examples a song can’t be just a song and I hope that I will always have the capacity to feel that way.

And as my adult life unfolded, there seemed to always be a new album or set of songs that came into my world at just the right moment to help me make sense of the changes I was going through at the time. During my divorce, Aimee Mann’s Lost In Space gave me the gift of lyrics that allowed me to understand that I wasn’t the first person to ever experience the depths of despair and personal failure that I was feeling in that period. Then a couple of years later, Jason Isbell came out with his Southeastern album that cracked my brain open to understanding how a man can grow beyond his faults and still be cool as a responsible adult who wears the scars of his past proudly as life lessons. As my therapist heard me say many times, I don’t think I would have emerged from that miserable period of the late aughts/early 2010’s as successfully as I did without the bulwarks of those records and I will always be grateful to and live in admiration of those two artists who touched the deepest parts of my soul with their exquisite art.      

While my life’s journey and the music that helped shape who I am are unique to me, I love the fact that both of my kids have become passionate music fans in ways that are specific to their lives. My son’s path from adolescent hip hop head to connoisseur of Americana and sophisticated country music has been a great source of joy to me and continues to be one of the bedrocks of our bond through our appreciation for Tyler Childers, who he turned me on to, and Sturgill Simpson and the constant stream of similar artists that we suggest for each other to check out. My daughter’s pre-teen mania for One Direction and the Jonas Brothers evolved into a period where she had to attend every music festival within driving distance of where she lived and now to being a major Taylor Swift and Harry Styles stan, complete with hanging on every new album release and spending her money on concert tickets. Her adult friendship with her aunt that’s anchored in the two of them travelling to attend live concerts and shows is another source of great joy and pride for me.    

So as my more recent forays into expanding my personal musical aperture to include Fela Kuti, Bill Evans and J.S. Bach, among others, continue my life-long evolution of appreciation and knowledge, I’m grateful for the ability to add to the rich pageant of music’s influence on my present life. The possibilities for more growth are infinite but I’ll always treasure the foundations and memories that I’ve just described and feel incredibly lucky that music has enriched my life in such a comprehensive and lasting manner. Feels like it’s time to cut this one off now, so I’m going to go listen to the new Harry album and find out what he’s got to offer this time around.

Michael O’Connell is a father, traveler, and aspiring writer. His obsessions with music and other forms of art were only known to a small, select circle of comrades until recently but now the cat’s out of the bag and running wild. He’s a New York City native who lived in Texas for a *long* time but returned to his Acela corridor motherland in 2017 and currently resides in Baltimore. This is his first piece for IHTOV or any other forum.