A Musical Memoir

Right now I'm having my grade 12 students each write a memoir, taking an important memory/event from their lives and telling me about themselves through that memory. For exemplars, I wrote one about my tattoos and one about Jack Layton's funeral, to tell them about myself and to show two very different ways of writing memoir.  Tomorrow, though, I'm going to challenge them to go a bit further, and to tell me about themselves through three songs, so I thought I'd better first challenge myself with the same assignment.

To say who I am through three songs is no easy task. I know what my three favourite songs are right now quite easily: Prison Girls, by Neko Case; Rococo, by Arcade Fire; and Dog Days are Over, by Florence and the Machine. Yet, these songs have nothing to do with me, besides the fact that I love repetitive, unrelenting songs that make me want to sing along at the top of my lungs. So, what are my three songs?

As lame as it may be, I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, by U2, has to be one of my choices. I have found a lot of things in my life - I've reached goals, I've explored the world, I have a full life - yet existentially I always feel as if there is more out there. An appropriate metaphor for my life would not be me walking down a path, but instead, me avidly, passionately, and sometimes frantically searching for something more, something greater, or maybe just something else.

For my second lame entry I'll choose All You Need is Love, by the Beatles. This is my motto, as simple and childish and black and white as it is, though I usually think of myself as a complex, mature, and gray-area person. I believe in love, compassion, agape above all else, and I hope that's what I'm trying to live. Sometimes it feels like no matter how much I keep learning and questioning and exploring, everything really boils down to love, whether it be "Jesus loves me, this I know," or "All you need is love."

I feel like to counter-balance these lame songs I should choose something darker, like Radiohead's Where I am and You begin, yet as much as that song seems to haunt my soul, it does not add to who I am. Neko Case, on the other hand, seems to not just visit my soul, but has perhaps moved in and taken residence within my being. I do not go a day without listening to her or singing her, and the song that speaks to me most is Vengeance is Sleeping, which includes the line "I'm not the man you thought I was." However tame I may have become on the outside over the last decade (and that just means tamer than before, and not tamer as compared to others), is not reflected on how passionately I feel things inside, including my feminism.

So that's me, I guess. At least for now.