Photo Source: The Xavierite
Music is something people have listened to and used in a variety of different ways since the beginning of time. For some, it is inspiration, a tool for relaxation, a teaching instrument, anything. For me, and for many others, it is a tool for telling time.
No matter what period of our life we are in, there is a soundtrack that accompanies it. There might be songs we listen to to cheer ourselves up during hard times that we experience. Songs that after we escape from those times, we might never want to listen to again because they’ll only serve to remind us of the bad, even if they were the only good thing we had at that time.
There might be songs that we listen to only during a certain season because lyrics about the summer sunshine only make us yearn for warmth if we listen to it in December. And there may be songs, or artists, that are a part of our entire life’s soundtrack.
Growing up, I listened to all the retro stations my parents would put on when they drove me around, taking me from place to place. I cannot remember how old I was when I first heard Stevie Nicks’s enchanting voice. All I know is I loved the song “Edge of Seventeen,” but considering I could barely understand English at the time, I would make up the words whenever I heard it. I didn’t even know who the woman singing was.
Later on in life, I was sitting in my bedroom while my dad watched tv in the living room. A beautiful melody drifted into my room that stopped me from whatever I was doing. I made my way over to the tv and saw on the screen a beautiful woman dressed in black playing a song on the piano. She was surrounded by a coven of witches who watched in amusement. I felt like one of those witches myself with the way I was drawn to the screen and so enchanted.
From that moment forward, I was properly introduced to Stevie Nicks, and I knew now that she sang that song I heard on the radio as a child and couldn’t decipher, and I also knew that the haunting song she had performed in front of the fictional witches on tv was “Rhiannon.”
Years passed, and Stevie Nicks’s music was still the highlight of my life’s soundtrack. When I started my first year of college, and I felt lost and confused every single day, I knew the one constant I had in my school week was sitting in the library and writing while I listened to Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac.
On June 23, 2023, my daily soundtrack finally came to life when I stood sandwiched between my two best friends in the United Center watching Stevie Nicks perform live the songs that had gotten me through some of the most insane moments of my life. The music was real, the emotions and the memories were real too. I realized then how impactful her music had been for me my whole life.
Who would have thought that “Rhiannon,” a song recorded in the 70s would still be performed live in the year 2023? Or even more incredibly, that my parents, who would sit pressed to the radio in the late 70s to hear Fleetwood Mac’s newest song, would one day have a daughter who would get to see its lead singer live. Or that while I danced to “Edge of Seventeen” at Saint Xavier’s spring formal, my dad had done the same thing at a dance club forty years prior.
The music we listen to makes up such a large part of who we are, but it transcends us. It serves as a marker for moments in our history, and it is larger than us. I have no doubt that if I have kids someday, I will pass onto them my incredibly aged and overplayed records and cds of Stevie Nicks and Fleetwood Mac. I will one day pass on my Stevie Nicks 2023 tour shirt onto a daughter that will wear it and call it a “vintage find.”
The music we love will live on forever, and just as it tells its own story- it will tell our stories
someday as well.