By Claire Moriarty

My Mom Gave Me Music

AND MUSIC GAVE US CONNECTION

by Claire Moriarity

Visual by Quinn Donnelly

*Paulina Subia is the Managing Editor of Five Cent Sound Magazine. She did not edit or revise this article before its publication.

When I was a little kid, my mom’s cell phone ringtone was the guitar riff from David Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel.” By age five, I knew every word and identified with the lyrics long before I even understood the concept of relating to a song. It became the theme song of my youth.

“Theme songs” like this saturate my childhood. When I think back to being a kid, I think of descending on the kitchen with my brother, opening iTunes on the family computer, and blasting The Killers (my first favorite band), Madonna (my first pop icon), or Pink (the reason I’m gay).

I have to credit my parents, especially my mom, for exposing my young, impressionable self to so much music and helping me develop my undying love for it.

Paulina Subia* is an avid music lover whose history with certain bands goes back to her early childhood. “I credit [my parents] with my taste in general,” Subia said. “Without them, I definitely wouldn’t have had an eclectic music taste, which is what I like — listening to a little bit of everything.”

These days, my mom and I talk about music all the time. According to Spotify Wrapped 2021, she was in the top 1 percent of Bowie listeners last year; I was in the top 0.5. I send her the playlists I make, and she tips me off if our local indie radio station back home is playing a particularly awesome set. We don’t always agree — try as I might, I don’t think I’ll ever get her into K-pop — but as I’ve grown up, our shared love of music has become one of my favorite parts of our relationship.

“Music is all we talk about,” Subia said. “My parents and I have very similar approaches when it comes to always going to shows, being obsessed with different musicians. It makes our relationship more chill because they’re just as big of fans as I am.”

The same is true of my mom and me, and it has brought about many good times in our family: the countless car trips with the four of us all belting Lady Gaga; the spontaneous visits to Sonic Boom Records and CDs, from which we always seemed to return with at least four albums; the collaborative Spotify playlist we crafted for this past New Year’s Eve (it was almost seven hours long). Seeing all of our favorite songs in one chaotic mix emphasized how different our tastes are, and made me feel more connected to them.

“Going to shows from when I was a little kid definitely solidified our relationship,” Subia said. “Our first rock show was Kiss and Motley Crue. I always thought that I had cool parents, because they were willing to expose me and my brother to any type of music, and any type of band.”

My memories of music from my childhood extend to concerts, too. My mom likes a good live show as much as anyone, and while I’m a little bitter that she never brought me with her to Madonna, she’s taken me to many others. I remember getting annoyed with her at a Coldplay show for just standing there with her arms crossed and looking out at the stage like she was watching a movie, not a live performance by a band we’d both been fans of for years.

But that’s kind of just how my family is. Growing up, I never saw my parents get emotional about anything. The day Bowie passed, my clock-radio woke me up with the news, and I raced upstairs, expecting to find my mom as devastated as I felt. (Let me just emphasize that Bowie is my mother’s most beloved artist of all

But when two people love the same song, in a small way, they understand each other. Even if it’s only for three minutes and seventeen seconds, they can connect. Music has the power to bridge the gulf of understanding even between parents and children, a gulf that often feels impossible to cross.

When I still lived at home and we saw each other every day, I felt like my mom never told me she loved me, but when we stood together in the crowd at a Brandi Carlile concert, watching Brandi sing “The Mother,” she reached over and put her arm around my shoulders. Neither of us had to say anything then.

Two years after that Brandi concert, I spent my twentieth birthday in a hotel room in Boston, the city where my parents met in college. My mom sent me a playlist she made called “20for20.” The first song on it is “The Mother.”

Over winter break this year, I put that playlist on at my parents’ house. I was hanging out in the kitchen while my mom made dinner. My parents remodeled it years ago, so it looks totally different than it did

time. She has adored him for close to forty years. His records take up half of our collection.) She just smiled sadly and said something like, “well, everybody dies.”

It’s in moments like these that I’m struck by how different we are from each other. My mom is so good at acting like she has everything under control, and like nothing ever gets to her (good things and bad). I have never been good at that. Because she doesn’t experience anxiety the way I do, she’ll never truly know why some things are harder for me than they should be. Many times in my life, I’ve felt like the space between us is so tangled with misunderstanding that we

can’t possibly connect. when my brother and I had our dance parties there. “Movies” by Weyes Blood came on, and my mom said it reminded her a lot of me.

“Really?” I said. I’d assumed she just put that song on the playlist because she thought I would like it.

“Haven’t you listened to the lyrics?” my mom asked.

“Some people feel what some people don’t Some people-watch until they explode The meaning of life doesn’t seem to shine like that screen

The Movies i watched when I was a kid The hopes and the dreams Don’t Give credit to the real things”

She looked up at me. “Doesn’t that sound like you?”

Part of me thought, Jeez, she must think I’m super jaded.

Another part thought, Wow, my mom gets me way more than I realized.