We’ve all had that song: the one that unexpectedly comes on the radio years later and stops us in our tracks. The one that floods the senses with memories so powerful, we’re instantly suspended in time.
Addictive songs from our teen years may offer important intel. I’m not talking about the soundtrack to your first make out session or what happened to be playing on the boombox that morning you wrecked your new Mustang. I’m talking about the song(s) you fell in love with— the ones that made you feel alive, in touch, on fire. Maybe you were a rebel, a warrior, a shining star. Or you were deeply sensitive, high-wired or full of freaky. Whatever the vibe, those songs offer clues about our fundamental personality traits (and may just foretell the future). Stay with me.
When I was 15-years-old, I used to drive our old family beater car three hours across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and into Washington D.C. to do teen runway shows for Macy’s and other department stores. I thought I was big stuff making $15 an hour and being ‘grown-up’ enough to drive myself to the big city.
On those long trips, there was only one cassette in the player— Yanni. (What a 15-year-old was doing listening to Yanni, I’m not quite sure but I was certainly obsessed.) I’d rewind this one song and play it over and over again, dozens of times, with windows down and heat blasting, in the middle of a snowy winter and long, dark evenings driving back to my small town.
That song made me feel like I owned the world; like I could do anything. I was global. I was empowered. I was unstoppable.
Fast forward to decades later, and I’m driving to a production shoot unlike any other in my life. Just before I arrive to the location, a slightly familiar, pulsing bass vibrates the glass on the windows. I turn it up and lean in more closely— and a huge smile erupts across my face. That Yanni song, the one I hadn’t heard since my teen years, is on Spotify radio.
I was stretching between parallel emotional experiences. Was it a cosmic coincidence? A universal nudge? It didn’t matter. Something special was happening here: that bright-eyed teen who knew anything was possible was present and accounted for. She was fully engaged. She still inhabits the heart of who I am.
Much to my happy surprise, science corroborates my theoretical link between the music we chose in our teens and our truest sense of self. Researchers at the University of Leeds propose the years between 12 and 22, are the years when we most become who we are— “the emergence of a stable and enduring self.”
I stepped fully (back) into my enduring self that production day. Filming for my own media company, ReFrame— I was fulfilling a long-held dream of sharing stories that connect us more deeply to others, to ourselves, to the planet. You might even call it my own quasi-rebellion to all the corporations and naysayers who keep telling me good news doesn’t sell and to just let it go.
Unstoppable. Empowered. Like I can do anything.
It was there in me (and the music) all along.