I grew up in a house where silence was rare. Records spun, radios hummed, and long road trips turned into ear-training games: Can you name this key signature? Can you feel the time signature? I didn’t realize it at the time, but those little contests were shaping me as much as the music itself.
By fifth grade, I was in band and choir, saxophone in one hand, sheet music in the other. I carried that practice all the way through high school. I don’t play much sax anymore, but the humming and half-sung lines that escape me while I cook or drive are direct descendants of those years.
For my eighth birthday, I got a dual tape-deck boombox. It could record mixtapes, but I had bigger ambitions: I launched my own pirate station, WZZZ Radio, complete with the tagline: “I’m live in my country, live in my city, and Liiiiiive in my underwear!!!” I still have the original cassette, static and all.
As technology evolved, so did my habits. Napster, Limewire, BitTorrent—all those chaotic portals to infinite music. I was the first in my group to burn recordable CDs, shuffling mixes from car stereos to Discman headphones. Later, I owned tens of thousands of physical albums—vinyl, cassettes, CDs—and even ran a record store inside my vintage shop. Then came Spotify. I joined as a beta tester and upgraded to premium the moment it was possible. It felt like the culmination of everything I’d been chasing: every song I’d once hunted across tapes and discs, gathered in one place, and an algorithm that remembered my history while nudging me toward discoveries I didn’t know I needed. Spotify wasn’t just an app—it was the next broadcast tower for WZZZ.
When I trace the years of listening, it plays back less like a list of artists and more like a shifting score. Early on, I leaned into quiet companions—indie and folk that wrapped me in stillness, carrying me through seasons of transition. Soon enough, the pulse grew louder: anthemic synths and raw voices urging me outward, into moments of intensity and emergence. From there, the soundtrack scattered like a kaleidoscope. Some stretches were filled with ambient washes and post-rock atmospheres, others with bursts of electric experimentation or nostalgic throwbacks that resurrected past selves for a song or two. Certain artists threaded through it all like familiar constellations—Björk, Radiohead, Bon Iver—while countless others flashed brightly and disappeared. What mattered wasn’t loyalty to any one sound but the movement itself, the refusal to stay still.
Music has never been just background for me. It’s been ritual, reflection, and sometimes simply survival. When I look back through my listening history, what I see isn’t just taste—it’s companionship. Every track, every album, every playlist is a timestamp of who I was then, or at least who I was trying to be. Spotify didn’t invent this, but it revealed it. It made me see the continuity: the kid with a cassette deck, the teenager burning CDs, the shop owner flipping vinyl, the adult building playlists deep into the night. Each version of me was just spinning another broadcast.
In the end, I realize I’ve been running WZZZ Radio all along. Spotify is just the newest transmitter. And somewhere beneath all these selves and sounds, I can still hear that child’s voice cutting through the static, signing on again with a grin:
“I’m live in my country, live in my city, and Liiiiiive in my underwear!!!”