002: Serendipitous Sounds

The College Years and a Little Love Story

Hi, fellow music lover!

Welcome to a memoir of music in life, as I reminisce on the impact music has had on me. I also include a bit of my story about how I met my husband and formed a band with him in this one but I will be covering more of that in the next post. Thank you so much for reading!

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I associate music with different times in my life since the elements of it permeate all memories when you peel them back you realize there’s always a song or soundtrack or someone talking about music somewhere in that memory. 

I think of the simple moments early in life, like when I was a little girl and my dad had an R&B CD on our stereo system while he made the bed. The radio on in the background of a Saturday morning with the smell of freshly mowed grass came in through the open windows. I loved to mess with the volume dial and stare at the CD cover art.

I will be a “back in my day” analysis fiend for a moment again. There’s a personal trend I’ve noticed that I tend to get music taste from either finding it on my own OR from word of mouth from other people (back in my day we didn’t have a certain streaming app or a certain social app designed to tell us what to listen to). As we move along in my history I have to address my college years. It’ll be difficult to sum up four years of absolute chaos and self-discovery but I’ll try. Talk about a formative period of your life. It is a time I often recall when I reminisce today, period. I look back on most of it with fondness although I experienced a whole gambit of romantic relationships and friendships that ended terribly. I also almost failed out of college completely for missing class a few times too many, but today’s post isn’t about that. 

I’d like to paint a picture of college Liz. I would sit alone for hours at our on-campus coffee shop. It was built out my freshman year. A girl I looked up to greatly (see the trend) was overseeing the build-out since she was in school leadership and was the person with the most vibes of a third-wave barista of anyone on campus. It was modern, it was hip. They made killer seasonal lattes, usually iced because it was 199 degrees in Florida all year. It had gorgeous huge floor-to-ceiling windows, an under-the-stairs cozy corner with an armchair, and an upstairs loft decked out with a bar-style table and stools. The stools wrapped around the entire railing so you could fit a ton of students up there. They warmed up the decor with a sitting area of armchairs and a cozy leather couch that I met my first college boyfriend on.  

It was the new meet cute spot, for obvious reasons you could ogle unsuspecting people from above (exactly what I did to my husband, wink wink).

I would study there every day, and as you can imagine it would get really loud in there with the concrete echoing voices to the highest cathedral ceiling with the modern black metal geometric chandelier that hung there. I had to block the noise out with headphones so I started listening to music while I worked. I was accustomed to studying in silence at this point, only using music when making art but this changed in college for sure. 

Circling back to the popular hipster crunchy indie barista girl for a moment. She told me her favorite bands at the time were Local Natives and Bombay Bicycle Club, so guess what I did. I became their biggest fan, I was like ‘oh this is what cool girls are into’. I still love them both, arguably two of the best indie bands, as all the bands with club in the name are. I went into my pretentious era of listening to basically sad dad music which I call that because it just makes me think of a farming dad, just out there by his lonesome whistling along to the saddest Americana or at the time popular folk. What a time to be alive. This would pendulum swing eventually back into pop and dancey music but I stayed in that sad girl indie folk era for a long time. I suppose I never really left it since I am still a sad girl listener to this day.

My study playlist I had in college is three hours long otherwise I would share it here, but I don’t think anyone is asking for that… (if you are drop a comment).

I can’t talk about college without mentioning my boyfriend (now husband of 7 years) because he was a crucial element to music becoming my literal life. To loop him into this discussion, we happened by each other often on campus. He was hard to miss since he was always air drumming and head-banging with headphones in his ears. He was always on his skateboard which was a swoon for me back then. As fate would have it our paths crossed, friendship groups melded and wouldn’t you know one of the first things he asked me was what kind of music I liked. We bonded instantly over our childhood favorites and current favorite bands.

When we started talking during one of our first hangouts we drove around in his car, iPod nano plugged in (you can judge him, it was weird for him to still be using an iPod then too). He played me song after song, telling me different memories he had with some of them, things getting quite vulnerable quickly, with music as our icebreaker. I consider this our first unofficial date. Something about my husband is that he embodies a true musician– he breathes, lives, and exists as music, and not a moment goes by that he isn’t thinking about it. He is truly the most talented musician I know because he is extremely creative. He produces/writes/and plays a ton of instruments, he is also just a super great performer. He has taught me so much. 

He smooth-talked me into singing for him in those early days of dating. I had been too shy to sing loudly so he leaned in and told me to sing louder saying “Wow, you have a nice voice”. Then he asked me to be in a band with him a few months later when were officially dating, the band name would be his last name I may add which was presumptuous but it worked out for us. 

The rest of the story will be in part 003 of serendipitous sounds.

Thank you so much for reading a little about my personal music history and some life stories!  

Enjoy a couple pics of college Liz and Chas :)