It’s official. I’m old.
Not because my 30th high school reunion is this year. Not because I became a grandma in January.
It’s because my favorite tunes are 30, 40 and 50 years old.
As I left the Leader office the other day and turned on Mill Street, “I Try” by Macy Gray began to play on my satellite radio station. I happily began singing, trying to recall the times I listened to the song in college. I got a glimpse of the screen … “1999.” The song came out in 1999? Are you sure? That was 27 years ago!
That’s not the first time I’ve had that sort of revelation … because you know, I am nearing 50.
At the end of 2025, Spotify not so kindly told me my musical age was in the mid-60s. I listen to a lot of Dave Matthews Band, as I have since the late 1990s … which were 30 years ago. Add in the Eagles, Collective Soul and Phil Collins, and yep, that makes sense.
Music has always been important to me. I spent my pre-teens lying on the floor next to my purple boombox on Sundays, listening to Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40” while my parents took an afternoon nap. My blank cassette tape was ready and my finger was on the “record” button. You couldn’t press the button too soon and you definitely couldn’t hit it too late.
Before my teens, I had very few cassette tapes that weren’t mixed tapes. “Barbies and the Rockers” was among my first cassettes. It must’ve come with a Barbie someone bought me for Christmas one year. I must confess I still have the tape. I think one of my other first cassette tapes that saw a lot of play was from the 1988 “Cocktail” soundtrack. I hadn’t seen the movie, but I loved that soundtrack, especially “Kokomo,” which I kindly shared with the neighbors as I circled the block on my bicycle with my best friends.
After “Kokomo,” my taste in music transitioned to cooler music like Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, and then I fell hopelessly in love with Donnie Wahlberg and the New Kids On The Block for more than a year.
Freshman year of high school, I drifted to hip-hop and alternative rock like Spin Doctors and Green Day. Somewhere around that time, I discovered something wonderful: Columbia House, the mail-order music club that heavily advertised several free cassettes or DVDs if you bought four albums over the next two or three years. Jackpot!
In my late teens, the theory became the louder the bass, the better the song. Bonus points for cuss words.
Then when I moved to Park Hills in my early 20s after college, I found myself willingly listening to country music for the first time – Kenny Chesney, Tim McGraw, Toby Keith, Montgomery Gentry and Trace Adkins. I thought I was in love with Kenny – and I got to see him up close in concert. He briefly married Renee Zellweger in 2005 and after that, he was dead to me.
I stopped keeping up with the top hits around the 2010s, sometime after “All About That Bass.” Have I missed anything? I am half joking.
I love how memories attach to songs. Sometimes the memories are good. Just about every single Dave Matthews song takes me back to the concerts I attended with my friends in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The never-ending songs, the feeling of being at peace (I don’t think it was the overwhelming aroma of pot everywhere around us), the silly things we said and yelled, the time we lost Katy’s car, and the time Anthony fell out of the car.
Sometimes the song brings sadness like how “November Rain” takes me back to freshman dances when I had no one to dance with.
Sometimes songs bring happiness and sadness like anytime I hear a song that Cassie and I jammed to while cruising Broadway in Cape Girardeau in our late teens. I recently listened to one of our favorite heavy-bass songs by TLC, and I laughed and cried. I hadn’t heard it in 25 years and wow, that song was terrible. I wished I could have laughed about it with her.
Some of those cruising songs, with heavy bass and/or cuss words, come in handy when I need to get out of a terrible funk. There’s a particular song by Live (about the Weavers who live down the street) that I call upon for “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days.”
But let’s go back to the problem. I’m musically old, musically set in my ways. However, I get tired of listening to the same music day to day: The Cranberries, Dave, Counting Crows, The Smashing Pumpkins and Red Hot Chili Peppers, but what new music will bring me joy? What won’t I, as an old person, perceive as just noise? Should I give Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish more of a chance? I caught an Olivia Dean song on the radio today, and it wasn’t terrible.
I also have heard “new,” old songs that I enjoy.
Now I’m wondering what my television-viewing age would be these days. For months, my husband has had me watching the old-people TV shows like “All in the Family,” “Barney Miller” and “MASH.” But my shows like “The Pitt,” “Hacks” and “The Lincoln Lawyer” balance things back out to my true age, 47. And now, we are watching shows like “Sesame Street,” “Arthur” and “Nature Cat” for my grandson so I think my age will continue downward.