I still clearly remember my maternal cousin giving me an audio tape – Off The Wall by Michael Jackson and this was my first very own audio tape. And man, did the song “Wanna Be Starting Something” literally start off my musical journey or what.
That began my unending fascination with the King of Pop, Michael Jackson and it therefore followed that his “Bad” was one song for all occasions for a long time to come. When I used to come back from school, on Saturday afternoons and entire Sundays, during summer and winter vacations, this song was almost on an endless loop for very many days, months even.
And then Classic Rock happened. My eldest paternal cousin, the one I used to look up to and consider a role model in many things, including taste in music gifted me an Audio CD – Cross Roads by Bon Jovi and the first song in that CD, “Living on a prayer” took my music appreciation to an entirely new level. The way the song started, the keyboard riffs gradually building to a crescendo with the drums literally exploding out of nowhere leading to the lead guitar riffs was truly an out of the world experience for me. You have to hear it to believe it.
This started a lovely musical journey for me with Bon Jovi, U2, Def Leppard, becoming mainstream bands for me and regular features on my music player and Walkman. When I was in high school and college, you would be hard pressed to find me silent. All the while I used to be hearing to and humming one or the other song at will.
Given that my dad was well travelled, he introduced me to the soulful tunes of Kenny G and his saxophone and this song The Moment holds a special place in my heart as it almost always managed to bring a tear to my eye and extraordinary peace to my mind whenever I had any ‘teenage troubles’ bothering me.
And then in 1994, when Greek composer Yanni performed live at the Acropolis in Greece, my fascination for western instrumental music took entirely new proportions. The next few months were spent in listening to and appreciating the finer nuances of composers creating contemporary western music and using philharmonic orchestras to present them to audiences. Santorini was a classic example of one such piece which haunted me to no end in those days.
And then when I grew older and mostly started listening to MP3 songs on my system, Linkin Park burst on to the scene with their immortal track In The End. This marked a new phase of fascination with the contemporary rock genre for me with groups like Linkin Park, Creed, Limp Bizkit, Hoobastank ruling the roost.
In recent times, after I started my career, life kind of caught up with me and it took me almost 8 odd years to get back to listening to music regularly. And guess what old favorites Linkin Park with their latest album Minutes to Midnight and more specifically the track Waiting For The End played a huge role in music reappearing in my life in a big way.
While most of the above journey contains only the non Indian music that I have enjoyed over the years, the influence that Ilaiyaraja, AR Rahman, Harris Jeyaraj and Yuvan Shankar Raja have had over me has been tremendous. In B-School, when I rediscovered my South Indian Tam Brahm roots, songs from Tamil movies played a huge part in me recognizing and appreciating the huge ocean of talent in these music directors. AR Rahman in particular continues to wow me consistently with almost all his songs, barring a few.
Thus, it would be not be an overstatement if I stated the music has and will continue to play a huge role in my life, more so given that my little two yr old daughter seems to enjoy her Tamil movie music quite a bit
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This post is written for WordPress Daily Prompts : 365 Writing Prompts where the idea is to publish at least one post a day based on the prompts provided.
Today’s prompt was “What role does music play in your life?” I took the liberty to use this prompt to chronicle some of the wonderful artists and composers that I have enjoyed over the years.
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The image used in this post has been sourced from Google Image search.