83.
That’s the number of playlists I currently have on my phone.
To say I’m a music lover would be an understatement. All my life I’ve been surrounded by music. Not in the way a child of a musician would be, but in little ways that eventually grew: on roadtrips with my family, through dance parties in my living room as kid to all the time I spent at a dance studio.
The first song I remember loving to the point of playing it on repeat constantly was “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” by Shania Twain. I was three. I knew every word, and I flaunted it. I danced around my living room, “singing” at the top of my lungs and living it up the way Shania would have wanted me to.
As I got older, my music tastes developed beyond my parents’ CD collection. There was my Barry Manilow phase in second grade. Around sixth grade, I discovered Taylor Swift through a borrowed “Fearless: Platinum Edition” CD.
For me, music is memories. So much of my life has been intertwined with music that it’s hard to separate the song from the moment. Freshman year of high school was Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto and the Ingrid Michaelson Pandora station. Sophomore year was Red by Taylor Swift, and so on.
My music taste wouldn’t necessarily be considered diverse. Pop music tends to make up the majority of my playlists with a little bit of alternative thrown in for good measure. I may not know every up and coming band, and maybe two out of my top three favorite music artists have sold out Soldier Field — twice. But the music I do love, I love passionately. I sing every word; I buy the CDs and records and share it with friends through my many, many playlists.
Music has this incredible ability to bring us together. It translates over cultures, over languages, over anything that could separate people and reminds us that we are all remarkably human. It’s Americans screaming their heads off at a K-Pop concert, it’s when musicians unite to create a song to support Orlando, it’s a real-world revolution in a musical.
I am reminded most of the impact of music in people’s lives at concerts. There are times in most concerts where the artist will drop out of the song and just let the audience keep singing. It’s magical. It never fails to send shivers down my spine because at that moment, I understand that concerts aren’t just about seeing a certain artist in the flesh. It’s about connecting with the people around you, feeling the energy from the performers and the crowd.
It’s about finding common ground through music. A single song can take on a million meanings for a million different people, but that doesn’t change the fact that all of them love the song just as much as the person next to them.
In a world that tends to find itself divided, music unites, and that is true power.
