Radios > Anything

I wish I were good enough at any instrument to be in a band. But I'm not and I doubt I ever will be. When I was in sixth grade, I had the dream of playing my clarinet in Jazz-Rock fusion band. This didn't happen and I'm not sure if I'm glad it didn't. How great does Jazz-Rock sound? Does this exist already? I need answers.

Music has always been a huge part of my life, from when I was young, up until now. I listened to Radio Disney as a kid, and my mom used to play this R&B station called 98.7 Kiss FM which just went off the air a couple years ago. I remember every Christmas my mom would play Elvis Presley's Blue Christmas on our huge stereo system via a cassette. When all my friends were listening to strictly CDs, my mom was still stuck on cassettes and I'm glad I had the opportunity to see how they worked for some time in my life as they're obsolete by now. I have really fond memories of the song Do You Hear What I Hear. It was my favorite Christmas song. Now I'm having awful flashbacks to Dominique the Donkey, and The First Noel.

Gosh. When I was growing up, there was no holding back any genre in our house. When I approached my first teenage year at 13, I was in middle school and used to listen to the greatest rock station in NYC. I would stay up all night sometimes just to hear songs I never heard of. Classics like Summer of '69, Boys of Summer, It's My Life, Hotel California, Piano Man, gosh all that good stuff. They played music from across the decades so I became a huge fan of certain songs like Popular by Nada Surf, Sex and Candy by Marcy Playground, Oscar Wilde by Company of Thieves, and Closing Time by Semisonic. I became so engrossed in the music I was listening to, and I felt on top of the world whenever I lied down in my bedroom, staring out at the stars while listening to Bittersweet Symphony.

Sometime when I was in 8th grade, that awful green radio-phone abomination turned off and never turned on again. I felt a part of me had gone missing, kind of like when the stereo system we had went kaput. By that time, everyone was listening to music online, and downloading songs onto their MP3 Players. Despite not wanting to, I gave in to the hype. Listening to music online is not nearly as great as listening to it on the radio. Music through the airwaves has a different sound. It feels more like home. It's a simpler platform than what we use more today, but I feel that if I heard all my current favorite bands on the radio, I would become entirely nostalgic. Having to fiddle around with the position of your radio when the sound becomes fuzzy and hearing the hum in between songs are the greatest feelings.

I miss my radio.

I think I'll buy another radio.