Do you have a song or piece of music that defines your life and you as a person, the tune that hits right in your heart and the text feels like you wrote it or was written for you? I think most of us do even if they sometimes change with your age. Being young that first love that did not happen or was broken will probably come close and there is oceans of song to choose from. As you grow older and life hits you in all directions the perspective changes and so will the songs that appeal to your being changes. For me, right now this song is from the great Swedish Heavy Metal band Mustasch from the album Thank You For the Demon the song All My Life. Check them out on http://www.mustasch.net/. The song start with “All my life I’ve had to cover up what others done” and what the band means by that is of course not the same as I read in to it but that very sentence sums up my childhood in a nutshell.

I grew up in a family torn apart by alcohol abuse and eventually my mothers suicide. In a very young age me and my brother had to take care of ourselves in the city suburbs. We had to take care of our parents when they were drunk and many time we had to leave during the night to stay at a relative in another part of the city. My brother had many friends and tried to stay away from the home leaving me to sort things at home. I will write more about this in my book.

Another band I like to listen to is Social Distortion http://www.socialdistortion.com/. They make me glad with their straight forward music and fantastic guitar solos! I recently discovered them through my son as we share the same music taste for most. Social Distortion has been going for 40 years and when they started I was also a punk rocker trying to start a band. They succeeded better than me. I was never very good at the drums even if it is not really needed playing Punk, but if you can somewhat keep the pace it helps the other band members. I had long curly hair that had its own mind on how to settle, so I never got to have the Mohikan hair even if I once tried to color it blue. The same color my foster parents got in their faces when they saw what I had done. Today I can really relate to the lyrics “Life Goes by so Fast” from the song “Story of My Life” by Social Distortion.

I must mention another favorite band Rammstein from Germany. I like how they disregards every convention in how a metal band should sound like and I am not really sure they define themselves as that. My German is even worse than my English so I struggle to understand all their lyrics and as they also play with the double meaning of words it gets even harder. At least my German has improved since I started to listen to Rammstein, Danke! The pyrotechnics when they play live is something else!

I enjoy most types of music even if Blues, Metal and Rock are my favorites. I struggle to enjoy today’s mainstream pop and hip hop they play on the radio. For me it sounds pretty much the same and all sounds like a variant of a lullaby or nursery song only with someone wailing away instead of a loving mother softly singing. I also enjoy listen to classical music and fortunately for me my son plays the piano like a god so I get to listen to his songs everyday he is at home. He also creates music for video games or background for presentations.

So to quote one from ABBA “Thank You for the Music”! Thank you to all music artist, to many to mention, for the music I have enjoyed so far and thank you for still creating more. After all, a song lyric is a poem and even if the words not always makes perfect sense even to the writer someone will find a meaning when it comes together with the music as a unit.