I grew up with a weird taste in music. My mother is a classically trained pianist, so I grew up with a lot of classical music. She was also paid to play in a lot of musicals, so growing up I would listen to a lot more show tunes than the normal child. And not the big 80’s musicals either like Les Miserables or Hair, but rather weird things like the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, or Little Shop of Horrors, or my favourite and first musical I ever saw My Fair Lady. My parents were also into bands like The Who, Supertramp, Styx, Elton John, The Platters, The Beatles, and Queen, so I grew up with a lot of piano music in the house. Also belting singers. Musicals love their belting singers.
When I started grade school, my mom got worried when I asked for my first Spice Girls CD, mostly because she was afraid I would get stuck in the Pop charts for Pop music. And I did for a time. I did my time with Amanda Marshal, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilara, and all those boy bands in the 90’s. I eventually got bored with Pop music as a whole by my later years in grade school and by grade 7 I rediscovered my now favourite band Queen, buying their greatest hits 3 disk album. Although it was really difficult to say that your favourite band is a band that is most known for dressing up as women and having naked women ride around a track on bikes to a bunch of grade schoolers who already don’t like you.
Afterwards when I was in high school, I tried to get my friends to send me their music so I could expand my tastes. And because I would watch a lot of Japanese Anime, I would listen to a lot of J-Pop and J-Rock.
I realized afterwards when I started dating that I would adopt the musical tastes of whomever I dated. I think I grew out of that after a guy who liked me tried to get me to listen to Tool and would bad mouth Queen and Meatloaf. I could never really get into it, although I don’t know if it was because I didn’t like their music or because he would bad mouth Queen. At any rate, I kept all the music that my exs would give me because regardless of how we broke up I would like their music.
I really tried to like whole bands, but I realized that I liked single songs more than I liked bands. It was really rare when I would find bands that I liked. I can still count all the bands I would call my favourites on one hand. Right now my favourite bands are Queen, an all girl Japanese rock band called Scandal, and a Japanese Pop band called LM.C. Everything else that’s in my music library ranges from The Beatles to Meatloaf to Oasis to Reel Big Fish to Dragonforce to Tenacious D to Metric to random show tunes to random Pop songs off the top 100.
Everything just kind of comes down to what I like in a song. I’m definitely a sucker for piano players, and a good bass will always get me going. I can’t stand singers who don’t push their ranges, and there are a bunch of songs where I only like a certain riff in the middle of the song and nothing else. I think I stopped caring about a lot of bands mostly because there’s just so much more to music than just liking bands. I guess it does mirror me in a certain way. I like a lot of songs, but a few bands. And I guess I would call myself talented in a lot of things, but only really try in a few things. Hopefully at one point I’ll figure out why I like S&M by Rhianna and what that says about me…
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