Senior Moments: My history in music

For me, writing is so dependent on what is going on in my head at any given moment. When people ask about my process, I’m never really sure what to say. It doesn’t happen the same way twice, and a majority of it happens in my head — creative rituals I can’t even comprehend, happening long before I actually sit down to write anything. The only thing that can connect each writing experience together is what comes from the outside: music.

It’s probably unfair to say music is a part of my writing process, because it’s really just a part of the process of living for me. The desire to be completely and totally immersed in art doesn’t just exist in visual dimensions — it touches all the senses, and one medium can fill in the gaps where another one fails. As an artist, I don’t just listen to music to appreciate it. It can be a tool. When I’m trying to write from a place I can’t reach, music can be a catalyst to open different recesses of my brain — a way to trigger déjà vu.

Growing up, I would wind up cassette tapes with tracks by ABBA and The Dixie Chicks. I would slide our “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” record out of its sleeve and place the needle on it as gently as if it were a butterfly’s wing. I would dance to a Norah Jones CD spinning in a stereo system that weighed twice as much as me and listen to the Avett Brothers through headphones on a tiny black MP3 player during long car rides.

Songs have a way of stitching themselves into moments and searing themselves into our memories. When our human brains can’t remember what we ate for our last meal or who our last conversation was with, they can still recall the lyrics or melody of a song heard 50 years ago. We’re designed to be impacted and intrinsically changed by the art we can hear.

Even the clearest memories from the earliest times in my childhood involve music in some form. I can close my eyes and see my family dancing to Peaches and Herb in a green and red kitchen I haven’t stepped foot in for nearly a decade. I can watch myself and my grandma sitting in the center of my very first bedroom, recording a mixtape featuring our own rendition of “You Are My Sunshine.” I can see white lines being sucked into the windshield as my dad drives and Tom Waits growls in the car. My sister and I strumming ukuleles and singing Taylor Swift around a campfire on a family vacation from ages ago is as clear to me as if we had been there yesterday.

In my life, music has left its mark in a way that’s unique from any other art form. When I read a book or a poem or see a piece of art, they become their own singular, beautiful moment. Music is woven into everything else around it — it colors the way I see people and times in my memory. Music has made my life infinitely more lovely, and for that, I will be forever grateful.

Mia Timlin is a senior at Notre Dame Regional High School. She's lived in Cape Girardeau for five years and loves reading, dancing, watching movies and listening to music by the Beatles.