Fuck, man, what songs have NOT stayed with me?  You have opened the start of a torrent, really. I could talk about this in DROVES, for PAGES AND PAGES, for nearly any given fandom, what have you done?  There are some among you now that know that as soon as you give me permission to send you one song, I will send you 100.  My music collection is enormous and ridiculous and I just have a lot of feelings. 

I don’t know what it says about me that once I like a song, I sort of always like it.  There is shit I first heard when I was six that I still super jam to?  So everything sort of stays with me, but I will break this down into some very significant ones with the disclaimer that there is SO MUCH MORE and I LOVE SO MUCH.  This is the kind of stuff that I usually send people just because I love them and we are friends.  I want them to have these songs because they’re part of me, whether I think they’ll like the song or not.  

The biggest one for me personally, and the one that’s stayed around the longest is the opening song from The Last Unicorn, which I first heard when I was four years old, and I was fucking enchanted. My baby sitter taped the movie off of TV, but she accidentally ended the recording when the unicorn became human and I was devastated. I still watched the fragment of the movie over and over and over and over again and I spent a weird portion of childhood tracking it down.  I own the movie something like four times over, imported the soundtrack from Germany, have autographs and a shirt and I spent so much time just feeling myself SOAR listening to the opening.  I have said frequently in the two dozen years since I heard it the first time that I suspected that if you cracked my chest open, this song would spring out of it like it’d been freed from a cage.   I can’t think of a time in my life when this story in every form - music, book, movie - was not desperately important to me. 

Sort of transitionally, when I think of fandom vs. personal importance, is the theme song from Slayers NEXT, Give A Reason.   I ended up finding and adoring Slayers when I was 13 or 14, and finding songs that were about affirmation of how awesome you were (vs how much a boy band wanted to touch your body) was really important to me.  I first heard this played from fucking Real Player, and OVER THE PHONE, so that might give you an idea of the quality, and yet I was still in love instantly.  I loved the energy of this thing, and I loved that the lyrics finally felt like something I could relate to.  I remember being so grateful that I found Give a Reason among all the love and lust songs everywhere around me at that period that I nearly cried.  It was scary to me though that I was only finding this kind of super self-affirming stuff that wasn’t about love and relationships coming from media in other countries, and not my own.  To this day, I love this one desperately. 

One of my favorite things in fandom is people saying, ‘Oh, ugh, this song reminds me of these two, please listen to this and suffer with me.’   We had a variation on this theme for a good portion of 2005 in the Yahoo Group (hooboy) that we had set up for JtHM Slash stuff.  For a while, there were songs that we sent each other while remaining on topic, but after a while, it just because, 'lol, listen to this’, resulting in some small cluster of niche-fandom weirdos associating a fuck ton of weird Eurodance with Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, because internet.

Thus, one night, I ended up with ’How Much Is The Fish’.  I was sitting in my dorm room, 19 floors up, with my roommate Trin.  I told her I’d just gotten a new song and wanted to play it, so she paused what she was doing to listen to it.  And it started, and we thought, 'Okay, whatever, yeah, this is kinda dance-y.’  We sat back to back in our computer chairs as we listened to the increasing level of words that did not make sense, and then he yelled, “HOW MUCH IS THE FISH” and we blinked at each other for the length of slight instrumental, and then both threw our hands in the air and screaming “HOW MUCH IS THE FISH?” right along with him about five seconds later.   

It sort of spread like a freakish virus after that point.

I gave this song to everyone I knew.  We played it at all our party things, everyone had a copy.  We were all taking languages and learning how to say 'How Much is the Fish’ in Turkish, Japanese, Chinese, and whatever else people were taking.  We made buttons and stickers.  We carried around bits of chalk and wrote it on things around campus.  One day in Japanese class, my sensei asked me with a totally straight face, “Sakana wa ikura desu ka?” and I did not have the fortitude to tell her the price of the fish because I was laughing too hard.  We lacked the vocabulary to tell her anything but 'There’s a song,’ as an explanation for my sudden breakdown.  We purchased things just because they had fish on them so that we could then go back and report on the price.  I later twisted my ankle dancing to it and then “to 'how much is the fish’ it” became code for fucking up extraordinarily while having fun.  We had this kind of freak group identity around How Much Is the Fish.   We tried to play it at my other roommate’s wedding last year, and literally everyone at that wedding who had known me in college said, “I still have that on my iPod, and I always think of you when I hear it.”

It’s like fucking institution, How Much Is The Fish. 

Boy, I hope you also wanted essays with these. 

Sometime in about 2008, I found Ruslana, and Wild Dances.  This is another one that I just give to people I love because I love it so much.   I prefer it in Ukrainian, but this song had me from the opening horns.   I love everything this woman touches.  There’s a Wild Dances Part 2 that I heard several years later, and I was so excited I couldn’t stand and ended up listening to it while screaming with joy on my knees.  Even now, I listen to 'Part 2’ and I remember my apartment in Portland on the ground floor and where everything was, and working on my thesis, and being with my ex and just pumping this song into my veins to keep me going.  Wild Dances was the first song my new laptop ever played, because I like marking significant events with songs that mean something to me and making the 'first’ of anything 'count.’  I destroyed a pair of speakers because of this song, and I used Ruslana for a lot of affirmation while working on my thesis in art school.  It influenced a little of Banshee, even.

And I mention Banshee, because how can I not when someone asks me a question about music. 

Of course everything from SWAN/ISH has an intense association with it for me (and I’m actually planning to make a whole post on LJ of everything associated with SWAN/ISH, even down to just the 'I was listening to this while I wrote’ level), but there is one song that happened because I needed music for Banshee. 

When I was working on the end of ISH, I needed some songs for just Banshee, and while I was working, last.fm gave me a song from a band called Vanilla Ninja, and I really liked their sound and got several of their songs.  I put one of them, 'Liar’ into ISH, and no sooner had I done that then I heard ’Kingdom Burning Down’. 

I loved the sound immediately, and thought, 'Wow, these lyrics are perfect for her!’ and then it sang, “I’M STILL HERE’ and I thought I would fall apart. I swear I felt this song strike me in the chest and I was so overwhelmed I almost couldn’t breathe.  I felt like I’d turned to jelly during the chorus because the weight of a song that was Banshee in every word containing someone singing a powerful and slightly strained TITLE OF THE STORY?   I may have been trembling at some point. 

You may recognize Kingdom Burning Down as the title of my Tumblr, and my LiveJournal, and my signature on dA and in my email, in the titles of art, and just fucking everywhere.  I have such intense feelings for this song. 

I found The Birthday Massacre through Cherry Doom and being in the JtHM fandom, and while their "Red Stars” is a big Banshee song, their song 'Pale’ hits really strong Garak and Bashir notes with me.  I’ve named nearly every one of my G/B pictures with a lyric from this song.  I had the song for years before really listening to it properly.  It was only after becoming stuck in the woods in Pennsylvania and losing a lot of stuff in the mail that I found this in my collection and really used it fuel a lot of things.  It was fueling some Banshee, and then I got into G/B and it seemed to just flow right into it with no uneasy transition or anything.   This song always makes me think of the first autumn I spent with those two characters and how badly I needed to get out of the situation I was in.  

I’m definitely going to make that SWAN/ISH post on LJ, so if you were hoping for some more of that with this, you will get an Extreme Concentration of that soon!  With downloadable links, even!   I have so much stuff, and so many strong memories with these songs.  I love passing music along with the stories of how I got them and how I related to them.  It feels like passing along the documentation or provenance or something.  I know most people won’t think about my past with a song when they hear it, but I still love sharing it.  I actually have a few songs myself that always remind me of the story the person who gave me the song told me about it.  So I’ve never had the experience of needing this particular song to come after another one, but I always think that I know someone who does.   I like to imagine that maybe one of my stories will stick like that and someone will remember me talking about any of these songs made me fall apart at some point.