How I Discovered: The Beatles (Part One: 1962-1965)

This post is not really fair, because I never really "discovered" the Beatles. They have always been a part of my life; in fact, the earliest memory I have of music at all is hearing "Love Me Do" in the back of my family's white Chevy Suburban.

In light of this, I've decided to approach this post a little differently. In two posts, I'll be writing a sentence about what each individual album means to me, along with an estimate of when I got the album, if possible. The albums will be listed in chronological order, with three exceptions: I count Abbey Road as the Beatles' last album because it was the last recorded, even though Let it Be was their last release. The Past Masters albums, as collections of the band's singles, include songs from the band's entire career; thus, I will be using them as a sort of interlude between the two posts.

I listened to Please Please Me quite a bit after I purchased the 2009 remaster during my sixth grade year, and the song "Misery" in particular reminds me of my unsuccessful stint as a competitive swimmer for Wave swim team. The song "Boys" is the first song I played with two of my best friends in a band setting.

With the Beatles was the first Beatles album I bought digitally after the Beatles' catalog was made available on iTunes, but I didn't buy it until late sophomore year as far as I can remember. I consider it one of the peak "Beatlemania" albums.

A Hard Day's Night was purchased and played constantly throughout my sophomore year, especially early on. It is not a particularly sad album, but it always reminds me of a fun, exciting, complicated, and ultimately painful relationship with a girl.

Beatles for Sale must have been purchased around the same time. It contains arguably the Beatles' worst song, "Mr Moonlight," but also many of my favorites like "What You're Doing" and "No Reply."

I got Help! from one of my best friends, Jack around fifth or sixth grade. I had known some of the songs, like "You're Gonna Lose That Girl,"for much longer, but overall the sound of the album brings me back to middle school and bus rides on Quest Academy field trips.

Rubber Soul is an incredible album. I bought it around the same time Jack bought Help!, and all throughout sixth grade I had it on rotation with Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road, and Please Please Me in my mom's car. It is the last album the Beatles released before they really started to let loose in the studio and shows glimpses of what wonderful songwriters they were becoming.

I bought Past Masters, Volume One in a record store in Chicago two years ago. I was already familiar with most of the songs in one way or another ("Sie Liebt Dich" had been a joke among Jack and me since we were seven years old), but it was nice to actually own the album itself.

How I Discovered: Joe Dassin

People pride themselves on having non-mainstream or unusual taste in music, but I can say that I only know two other people who had heard of French crooner Joe Dassin before I introduced them to his music. The first was my good friend Jack, who first showed me his song "Salut" after discovering it somehow in middle school. We laughed at the song's obviously somber yet otherwise inaccessible message and its cheesy 70s vibe and forgot about Joe Dassin for a long time. The second person to have heard of Joe Dassin was one of my closest friends, a French exchange student who cracked up and wondered how on earth I had heard of him.
As I later came to discover, Joe Dassin is basically the French equivalent of Barry Manilow. I think that says it all, really.
It should come as no surprise at this point that my exploration of Dassin's music was greatly facilitated by my decision to subscribe to Spotify last year. Now Joe Dassin is more than a punchline to me; he is the man responsible for the hauntingly romantic "Et Si Tu N'Existais Pas (And If You Did Not Exist)," the bouncy and fun "Les Champs-Èlysées," and even some English songs like "Sunday Times." It's good to really mix things up every now and then, and Joe Dassin is an extreme outlier in my music library.

Favorite album: Joe Dassin (1975)
Favorite songs: "Salut," "Les Champs-Èlysées," "Piano mécanique," "Carolina (Sad Sweet Dreamer)"

Other: "For Mathew"

As Victor Hugo once said, "Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and that which cannot remain silent." It has an incredible ability to express, share, and even influence emotions that otherwise would go ignored or misunderstood.
It's with this thought in mind that I created the playlist "For Mathew" as a way of getting into character for Millbrook's fall play, Anne of Green Gables. I was cast as Mathew Cuthbert, the loving father figure to Anne Shirley, a very significant and challenging role. I had auditioned with hopes of being cast as Mathew but knew that it would be a daily struggle in rehearsal to discover, remember, and convey who exactly this old, quiet man that was basically a total opposite of me really was to the audience. He only has so many lines on which an actor can base his understanding of the character, so a huge brunt of the work was on me to bring the character to life! Mr. Kotzian, the theatre teacher, had mentioned making a "character playlist" before, and without even realizing it I began to create my own a few weeks before the show.
Though musically dissimilar, each song has some significant piece that reminds me of who my Mathew Cuthbert was. Many of them have lyrics that remind me of Mathew's actual personality or role in the show, like "Suddenly" from the Les Miserables film or Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's "Our House." Other songs spurred me on to develop a totally unique Mathew Cuthbert; for example, I imagined Mathew as a talented choral singer who had been forced to give up his musical dreams in order to take care of his sister and the family farm. It's for this reason that I included "The Pasture" by Z. Randall Stroope. One of my favorite songs from "For Mathew" is "The Water is Wide," which is  traditional Scottish song that Mathew could very realistically have known and loved in 1910 Canada.
The one song that will always remind me of Mathew Cuthbert, though, is probably the biggest outlier on the entire playlist. After a long day of rehearsal, I remember sitting in my car and hearing "Can't You See" by the Marshall Tucker Band and thinking, "This is Mathew." In my mind, the soft-spoken and loving Mathew Cuthbert was not always a shy old grandfather-type. He had once been an exciting young man with hopes and dreams that reached far beyond his home of Prince Edward Island, with a future and a lover and a story of loss.
Hearing that song that day is a moment I will never forget and one that will always remind me of both the beauty of theatre and the power of music.

How I Discovered: Alfie Boe

There is a difference between meeting an artist and discovering their music. I discovered Alfie Boe's music during the summer before my senior year when my friend suggested that I listen to his version of "Bring Him Home" from Les Misérables. Being a huge fan of the musical but also being more familiar with Colm Wilkinson or even Hugh Jackman, I remember saying, "He is almost too good of a singer to be Jean Valjean." I then largely forgot about him for a while.

Months later, as I sat in a New York restaurant for preshow dinner with my aunt, I noticed a black shirted, backpacked man walk straight past the tables into some sort of private underground room. I remember saying to my aunt, "I think that's Alfie Boe." We had flown up to celebrate my birthday by watching my all-time favorite musical, and frankly I had been somewhat disappointed that Ramin Karimloo's run as Valjean had come to an end. There's a certain magic that is felt when you actually see a celebrity, though, and I just had a feeling that this normal-seeming guy was none other than English tenor Alfie Boe. In some small effort to confirm my suspicion, I tweeted at him, "Am I hallucinating or did I just see you at the restaurant I'm eating at before the show??"

To my absolute surprise, he replied. I have never been more overjoyed by the word "probably" in my life, but in my mind, I knew. It had to be him.

A few minutes after this Twitter exchange, we made our way to the theatre and sat down. I had been waiting to see the show for weeks by this point, but now I was also hoping to see if the normal guy I had seen in the restaurant was actually the heroic Jean Valjean.

I will stop myself from overly gushing details about the performance itself. However, I will say that everyone in the house knew that "Bring Him Home" would be something incredibly special, and it was.

I will also say that my brief conversation with Boe made it obvious: he is a fantastic performer, a genuinely kind man, and unquestionably the man I saw at dinner that night.

Favorite album: Alfie (2011)

Favorite songs: "Bring Him Home" is so far ahead of the others that it's the only one I'll include

How I Discovered: Rod Stewart

There are only a few things I own that I consider irreplaceable, and each of them have a memory attached to them. Two of them, I got on the same night as a random surprise gift from my friend's dad: a practically mint condition Babicz acoustic guitar and an album which I had never heard, Atlantic Crossing. Though not my first introduction to Rod Stewart, the album was the first time I listened to his music with eyes that looked at his music as more than just one or two good songs.
I will say that I'm still in the process of discovering Stewart's music. He has a staggeringly large catalog, and I have only really explored two of his early releases. However, it doesn't take a lot of listening to realize how thoughtful and honest he is as a writer. One of my favorite songs off Every Picture Tells a Story has the line "Oh I never was good with romantic words/ so the next few lines come really hard," which was something of a revelation to me. Rod Stewart is certainly old, and he grew up in a time completely different from me in a country different from mine in ways I don't even realize. When both of us are honest with ourselves, though, we have the same doubts, joys, struggles, and thoughts as anyone who's ever lived. His songs are about the love and life every person experiences.
As a fun side note, Rod Stewart's music has helped me grow as a performer. I've used songs like "Sailing" and "Mandolin Wind" to help me get into character before plays, and his mandolin-heavy Every Picture Tells a Story has inspired me to purchase and try to learn the mandolin for myself!

Favorite album: Every Picture Tells a Story (1971)
Favorite songs: "Maggie May," "Mandolin Wind," "Sailing," "All Right for an Hour," "(I Know) I'm Losing You"

How I Discovered: Paramore

I was first really introduced to the group around sixth grade, even though I had been aware of their existence for years because of my brother's "emo" phase. My exposure to Paramore, like most of my exposure to music throughout elementary and middle school, was heavily influenced by my two friends Jack and Trevor; the three of us exchanged songs and basically created one large music library. I convinced Trevor to buy Riot! on iTunes, and it was this album that truly hooked me on Paramore with its heavy guitar, relatable lyrics (especially at the time), and generally new and young spirit.
In contrast to some of my other favorite artists like The Beatles or Queen, Paramore are a very recent artist. They released their first album, All We Know is Falling, in 2004 and rode the pop-punk/ emo wave of the mid 2000s with bands such as Cute is What We Aim For, Fall Out Boy, Panic! At the Disco, and other ridiculously named bands. Of course, the pop-punk wave crashed, and many of these groups found themselves without their fans, their relevance, or any real artistic output.
Not Paramore. Where Riot! allowed me to form my first really strong connection with the band, 2013's Paramore sold me on them being a truly great band. The album shows diversity of styles, lyrical and compositional maturity, and a fun, hopeful spirit throughout. The album was on repeat during my freshman and sophomore year, and because they are a modern band, I got to experience them in an unforgettable way: live and in person during the growing periods of the band.

Favorite album: Paramore (2012)
Favorite songs: "Grow Up," "Ain't It Fun," "Brighter," "crushcrushcrush"

How I Discovered: Run River North

It's hard not to notice a rock band comprised entirely of Asian-Americans, yet I never would have heard of them at all had I not been incredibly bored on a flight on March 28th, 2014. On that day, I read an article in American Airlines' inflight magazine, American Way about a new up-and-coming band and made a note of the band in my phone so I'd remember to look them up when I landed. For whatever reason, the band didn't really stick with me for any significant amount of time after.
Two years later, I rediscovered the band through Spotify and have certainly not forgotten them since. Their self-titled debut album is very folk-influenced and not something I would normally listen to otherwise, which is perhaps why I never really stuck with the band back in 2014. By contrast, their newest album, Drinking From a Salt Pond, quickly became one of my favorite albums ever when I sat down to give it a listen. As a musician, I love the sound they've developed through their newest album. As the son of a second-generation Filipino-American immigrant, I appreciate the way the lyrics of their first album in particular give subtle nods to the immigrant experience I've seen my dad and his sisters navigate.
The most exciting thing about Run River North is that they are musically and career-wise the youngest band I listen to on a regular basis. Unlike classic rockers or dissolved boybands, their story is still in its early stages. I'm excited to see where it goes next!

Favorite album: Drinking From a Salt Pond (2016)
Favorite songs: "Elam," "Pretender," "David Robinson"

How I Discovered: *NSYNC

At the end of my sophomore year, my friend and I took a fateful trip to F.Y.E., a music and video store at Triangle Town Center. Both of us being huge rock and alternative fans, we of course decided to purchase *NSYNC's Greatest Hits for $2. We laughed our heads off in the car at how ridiculous the lyrics, production, and singing generally were.

One year later, I'm wearing an *NSYNC t-shirt as I type this review. I do not think they're the greatest band in the world, nor do I even think the majority of their songs are of any artistic merit at all. A lot of the time, the band is genuinely laughable. That's exactly why I love them. They are a perfect picture of what a boyband should be: over-the-top, cheesy, unnecessarily serious, dated, and unashamedly marketed at teenagers of the time.

I love listening to albums all the way through, and my experience of *NSYNC has been primarily defined by my journey through each of their releases. My thoughts while listening to Greatest Hits were mainly, "This band is hilarious." After listening to some of the songs on The Essential *NSYNC, my thoughts were, "This band is actually kind of good." The Essential, which is a more comprehensive look at the band's career, includes one of my all-time favorite a cappella tracks, "I Thought She Knew." I dare anyone to listen to that song and tell me the five aren't incredibly talented singers. At the same time, I dare anyone to listen to No Strings Attached's "Just Got Paid" and hold in their laughter. *NSYNC is, with all their faults and cheesiness, fun to listen to.

That's enough for me.

Favorite album: No Strings Attached, 2000

Favorite songs: "I Thought She Knew," "Just Got Paid," "Thinking of You (I Drive Myself Crazy)," "Selfish," "No Strings Attached"