Chasing Amy-Lou

To choose the most important three songs in my life is an impossible task. Music for me is my lifeline. It is my first love, my passion, my shoulder to cry on, my pick-me-up and to some extent, my helping hand, my guidance, my religion. Music is as vital to me as water is to a desert (slight over exaggeration but stay with me on this one). It becomes my companion wherever I travel and it is with this that I associate music with my nomadic lifestyle. There are songs that remind me of car journeys; songs that remind me of dimly lit nights sat at a hostel bar in Beijing, China, drinking cheap local beer, laughing along as we play silly drinking games; songs that remind me of walks in St Pauli, Hamburg, discovering things about each other that only travellers would divulge; songs that remind me of crazy nights in Krakow, getting lost down the criss-cross of streets and pretending we knew all about the city’s integral history while wandering round the Jewish Quarter; songs that remind me of that spring picnic beneath the Eiffel Tower, eating Camembert and practicing my (terrible) French; songs that remind me of the lonely nights in Hong Kong, while I sat pondering my future; songs that take me back to Edinburgh, when we drank so much gin we got turned away from the ice-skating rink; songs that I hear when I’m at home, longing to be somewhere else.

So for me, three songs will never be enough and the ones I am about to talk about may not be the ones I wanted to mention at all; they may not even be the ones I think about next week, but for now, they are the ones I can say make me smile. Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” sparked my interest in this amazing musician. I heard it first when I was 16, during a dance class at college and from that moment I was hooked. His music has travelled with me far and wide; from my first Mp3 player as I darted across California on a Greyhound bus, a spritely 19 year old with the world at her feet, to the plane journeys across China, occupying a few hours of my flight time as a 27 year old, about to change the course of her life. Stevie Wonder has been instrumental in my love for soul and it is through him I discovered more about the origins of this wonderful musical genre.

“Waterfall” by The Stone Roses will always and forever occupy a corner of my mind. The lyrics mean so much, on a personal level, (“she’ll carry on through it all, she’s a waterfall”) and even though my love for this band did not blossom until later in my life, I can honestly say that had I never heard it, I would have missed out on something extremely monumental. Educating my fellow travellers and backpackers on British music is something I enjoy; I feel a strong need to open their minds to the musical forces at play in the UK, and The Stone Roses (and of course, Oasis) are the ones I choose to subject them to first (whether they like it or not). These bands are dear to me and will remain so for many, many years to come…I imagine…

As I find it increasingly tough to choose a final song, I will, instead, choose a band. This band is called (may it be cliched or typical) The Beatles. And I think the less I say about them, the better, for no words written by myself could ever describe the impact they have made, the indent they created and the lasting impression they have formed.

Undoubtedly, I will look back at this post with a shake of the head; I’ll want to completely change my choices of artist and song for something that bares relevance to a recent event or the last city I visited. Alas, I shall leave it be and hope that my overwhelming love for music doesn’t force me to alter what I have written.