The first time you listen to an album is sacred. An excited uncertainty bubbles in your chest at each new note as you try to decipher how it makes you feel. A bad album will make that first listen the last — but a great one will follow you through the years, holding your hand during life’s every ebb and flow. The songs become time capsules for the first time you heard them, transporting you back to who you were at the moment. It’s usually not just a mental shift; I can feel the sound of the girl I used to be echoing through me as soon as the familiar notes start to play. Our firsts never leave us; instead, they incorporate themselves into our personal history. It’s only fitting that this history should be commemorated in, say, an article that captures a snapshot of my most formative musical experiences.
Pure Heroine
I had never heard every one of my teen girl thoughts bottled up and packaged into a collection of three-minute masterpieces until Lorde’s Pure Heroine. Like most teenage girls, I fell into her orbit as soon as she asked the million-dollar question: “Don’t you think that it’s boring how people talk?” She saturated me in the feelings of the seemingly endless, vibrant youth slipping slowly through both of our fingers. Ten songs later, her adolescent heart already laid out on the table, she says to just “let ’em talk.” The night those lyrics rang through my laptop’s weak speakers under the dim glow of my bedroom’s fairy lights, something in my young brain changed forever. It was like I became possessed by the spirit of teenage future and — instead of ever leaving my body — it simply shifted to the spirit of teenage present. Suddenly, I was experiencing all of the tennis court laughs and the late-night drives and I could taste the same feeling in her songs. Before I knew it, Pure Heroine, my teenage soundtrack, was joined by Melodrama and Solar Power as odes to my newfound adulthood. Now, I’m slowly waning into the ghost of teenage past. Yet still, when Pure Heroine crosses my playlist, the air in my lungs starts to taste like the familiar wind of my hometown. I am 15 again, driving through streets I know like the back of my hand, and my youth is infinite.
Hozier
Before I heard Hozier’s “Work Song” in the seventh grade, I hadn’t realized the divine power of music. I didn’t really know what love was, but I knew this song was what it was supposed to feel like. I never wanted that feeling to go away, so I picked up his album and I never put it down. I remember begrudgingly trailing behind my mother under the scrutinizing fluorescent mall lights with this melody on a loop at full volume in my headphones. Her frustration with my lack of attention might have brought out the fight in me had I not been too preoccupied with training myself to memorize every exquisite lyric. These songs have seen me through my most melodramatic pre-teen crises all the way to my equally melodramatic college yearning. I think that’s what his music encapsulates best: yearning, be it for love, for agency, for acceptance or for justice. Every lyric is something out of an epic poem, and every verse is made even grander by Hozier’s deep, sultry voice belting each note. I couldn’t get enough, and I still can’t. The sinful gluttony for just one more line of devout passion will never leave me. I’m quick to devour all of Hozier’s new releases and carve out a special place for them in my heart, keeping them right next to my long-held hope for the kind of love he sings about.
Preacher’s Daughter
If I had discovered Ethel Cain’s music any earlier, I probably wouldn’t have been able to appreciate it. It was fate or serendipity that brought Preacher’s Daughter to my Spotify on a dark winter day in hell (re: the Bursley bus). I stared out the window while the ominous piano interlude for “Family Tree (Intro)” turned my random bad day into an artsy noir film. Each lyric walked me through Cain’s fictional life, from running away from her small town in Alabama to being cannibalized by her shady boyfriend, in the most piously visceral way possible. The events might not have been real, but her feelings of intense longing, regret and devotion to those around her transported me right into her shoes. Her evolution from a scared little kid to a brave woman making her way through the world pushed me to look back at my own evolution. For the next two months, this album became the only collection blasting through my headphones at all hours of the day. She consumed me (pun intended). I still don’t listen to her music with other people — it’s too personal for that. These songs are meant to be worshiped in the quiet of solitude, like a prayer to a nonexistent god.
Folklore
We all remember our first Taylor Swift song. Possibly my most vivid childhood memory is replaying the “Mean” music video for hours at the ripe age of 11, sitting in my princess pink room. I couldn’t stop there, of course. I quickly moved on to “Ours,” then “Enchanted” and, obviously, the iconic “You Belong With Me” saga. Needless to say, my little Speak Now heart couldn’t get enough of Swift’s odes to love and heartbreak. Post Speak Now, I became more of a casual Swiftie. I listened to her next few albums and enjoyed them fully, but it wasn’t until her drop of Folklore, deep in the pandemic, that I was converted into a die-hard Swiftie. This album spoke to me in a language I didn’t know I understood until “mirrorball” hit my ears. I couldn’t relate to her old songs of heartbreak, but she peered into my insecure soul with her slow tracks about personal crises. The story she told wasn’t one I needed to imagine anymore, it was one I had lived. It was like she had written my diary for me and published the entries in tracks like “this is me trying” and “my tears ricochet.” It was more therapeutic than therapy. These songs didn’t shove the insecurities away, but they sure helped show them out the door.
Ultraviolence
When someone tells you that you remind them of an album, that record becomes a holy symbol of your personhood. My sister’s affirmation that I am “so Ultraviolence” cemented this as my favorite Lana Del Rey album of all time. From sultry love songs like “Brooklyn Baby” to dangerously fresh beats like “West Coast,” Lana does it all in just one collection. Her superpower has always been making music that feels like the soundtrack to a femme fatale character’s life story, and each time I listen I can convince myself I’m living that femme fatale’s life. Even on grocery store runs and decidedly un-glamorous study sessions, her voice transforms the ordinary into an aestheticized experience. Years after discovering this treasure, instead of blasting this music with my sister on the short drive to school, I play it when she drives me home from Ann Arbor on long weekends. She’ll be happy to know that during my first week of college in my homesick fugue, this album was all I’d listen to. It’s forever a reminder of her and the (slightly problematic) aesthetic she’s placed in my path.
If you were to solidify these melodies and meld them together into the general shape of a person, it would answer to my name. It isn’t hard to see how the songs we gravitate toward in our formative years nudge us along to who we are meant to be. They affirm the validity of the parts of ourselves we want to hide, especially our best-kept secret desires, and give us a taste of what it would feel like to embrace them. The first listen is an epiphany, but all the listens after that become a louder declaration of who we are. My personal history might be different from yours or it could be identical, but either way, we will understand each other. That’s all music is: a way to understand people. So, what music understands you?
Daily Arts Writer Mina Tobya can be reached at mtobya@umich.edu.