In two days, I’ll be 24, and I’ll have been listening to music with some fervor for a decade. While I was raised with a solid appreciation for music, and I certainly didn’t dislike it as a young kid, I wasn’t discovering things for myself, really. That came later; as a teenager, I started exploring music — with no small amount of credit due to internet access and music piracy becoming quite easy for someone with some technical skill. Of course, it’s now insanely easy for those without technical skill, which, given the development of technology, shouldn’t come as a surprise.
At 14, I started uncovering musical tastes I hadn’t fully realized. What follows is a short timeline of my musical development over the last decade.
Age 14: Weezer – “Only in Dreams,” from Weezer (1994)
I was probably nine years old when I first heard Weezer — but I didn’t really know it. I fell in love with the infamous “Buddy Holly” video, but more as it pertained to TV classic “Happy Days,” which I’d been watching as regularly as I could in 1995. When the Windows 95 development team decided to showcase their “innovative” video playing technology and plopped the “Buddy Holly” video on the Windows 95 beta CD my parents had procured, a series of motions was set in place, and in 2000, I fell in love with Weezer’s 1994 self-titled debut. Soon after, I discovered Pinkerton — and it’s easy to understand how my musical progression henceforth seems to have developed.