Last year, my Spotify Wrapped showed that I listened to music for 193,800 minutes in 2024. Spotify says that this puts me in the top 0.5% of listeners in the world. If I’m not in meetings during the work day, music is on. I have a sleep playlist that plays most nights when I don’t fall asleep listening to baseball on the radio. I like music—lots of different kinds.
I may have shared this here before, but I have this weird thing about listening to music: I have pretty strict seasonal music tastes. Most of the music I listen to is really only appropriate for certain times of year, most often dictated by the weather rather than the date.
Some of this is because certain genres of music lend themselves to certain kinds of weather and seasonal vibes, but most of the time I associate a musical artist or their work with the time of year I first heard them.
I have occasionally shared music recommendations in this newsletter, but I’m not sure I’ve ever really written at length about different music I like and why. This week I figured I’d pick nine songs that mean a lot to me, for one reason or another.1 I’m not listing songs here because they’re “favorites,” by any means, but more just because they carry some kind of meaning for me. As you’ll see, a good number of them are meaningful because of their ability to teleport me to very specific time and places in life not unlike a photograph can.
Sharing some meaningful music feels weirdly vulnerable, I think because music interests can be so personal, but whatever. Here are 10 songs that are meaningful to me and why, listed in no particular order.2
Musician by Porter Robinson
I can place when I first heard and fell in love with Porter Robinson. I somehow stumbled across a trailer for an NHL video game and while I wasn’t at all interested in the video game, I was compelled by the song choice for a hockey video game. I saw the trailer in 2014, and you can watch it here.
There’s a lot I love about Porter Robinson, and I won’t go into all of it here. But “Musician” is a particularly meaningful song to me because of how it clearly communicates the difficulty of pursuing creative work and how that can be a complicated pursuit.
The key lyric in this song for me is:
How do you do music?
Well, it's easy
You just face your fears and
You become your heroes
I don't understand why you're freaking out
As one who would love to make his living as a creative, I’ve often heard this lyric and thought of it in writing terms. “How do you become an author? Well it’s easy. You just face your fears and become your heroes. I don’t understand why you’re freaking out.”
The prospect of making a living purely as a creative feels impossible and intimidating. Porter captures that feeling in this song, and it moves me at a deep level whenever I hear it.
The music video is cool, too. It embodies what Porter has said is a common theme in his music. He often writes music imagining it playing on the speakers in a futuristic mall-like space, almost like something on Coruscant out of Star Wars. This song does feel like that, which is cool.
Konstantine by Something Corporate
I think my single favorite genre of music is early 2000s emo/pop punk music. Not so much the super whiny stuff or the more hardcore stuff, but the ballads and the softer brand of emo/pop punk. While some of the music in this list is, as previously mentioned, seasonal in its nature for me, early 2000s pop punk like Something Corporate transcends those lines. I listen to music like this year-round.
I was put on to Something Corporate by some friends in middle school, and I think part of what attracted me to the genre was my early exposure to alternative rock in the late 1990s (more on that later). Also what attracted me to pop punk in the early 2000s is that the themes also revolved around teenage angst and emotional volatility, and I was swimming in all of that around that time.
“Konstantine” is, in my view, objectively the best Something Corporate song. It is one of the better piano pieces I’ve ever heard in modern music—but I say this simply as a music enjoyer, not a musical critic. The main reason this song means so much to me isn’t really because of any profound depth so much as I think it is a beautiful embodiment of teenage love, heartbreak, and all of its associated feelings.
We’re All We Need by Above & Beyond and Zoë Johnston
Back around 2007-2008, when I was in high school, I worked at a local pizza joint. It was a really great job. It paid well. The owners were kind. My co-workers were (mostly) cool. I was a waiter—the first male one they ever hired—but the place was small enough that everyone sorta did everything. The only part of the job I really hated was closing the shop at the end of the night. I would have rather worked a month full of Saturday double-shifts than close a single night.
Why? Because sweeping and mopping the entire dining room was a huge pain, and a couple of managers wouldn’t even let me start the process until after we had officially closed—so that no customers would roll in at 10:50pm and be put off by a high school kid cleaning, I guess?
Anyway, one of my favorite managers to close with was Adam.
Adam was awesome because he would let me start sweeping and mopping the dining room 30 minutes before close. He’s also awesome because he introduced me to trance electronic music, specifically the work of Armin van Buuren and Above & Beyond. Adam would put on a three-hour trance podcast (which was really just a radio show) from one of these artists for us to listen to as we closed the restaurant for the night, and I was hooked.
I still have not been able to see Armin in concert, which I hope to rectify at some point. However, I did get to see Above & Beyond in Nashville back in 2018, and it was incredible. “We’re All We Need” was one of their biggest songs at the time, and it was great to see it performed live.
This song isn’t particularly meaningful to me, but this genre is. It got me through closing the restaurant in high school, and it has been the soundtrack to writing both of my books and countless research papers in college and seminary.
If you’re interested, both groups still have weekly podcasts/radio shows, though they have morphed over the years. Armin streams A State of Trance on YouTube, and you can find Group Therapy With Above & Beyond wherever you listen to podcasts. Great music for working, writing, perhaps working out.
Reckoner by Radiohead
Radiohead is a band whose music is significantly governed by my seasonal music tastes—perhaps more than any other band or genre of music on this list.
I also have to thank my time at B. Antonio’s Pizza, the aforementioned pizza joint, for introducing me to Radiohead. When they released In Rainbows on October 10, 2007 on their website through a system that let fans set their own price, a lot of my co-workers were talking about it. So I popped over to their website and downloaded it for free, having never listened to them. At this point, Radiohead has probably made thousands of dollars off of letting me download In Rainbows for free in October 2007.
I love Radiohead, but I can only listen to them in one, relatively-narrow climatological period of the year—when the chill, damp days of fall set in, most often beginning sometime in October and running all the way up until it’s time for Christmas music on the night of Thanksgiving. Radiohead becomes my default music for that four-to-six week period, and it is especially important to me on those gross, gray fall days. I literally call them “Radiohead Days.”
Radiohead, and In Rainbows in particular, is meaningful to me for much the same reason as the trance music I wrote about just above. While I started listening to it in high school, my favorite experiences listening to Radiohead came a few years later. I have vivid memories of grinding out many research papers in the Zondervan Library on the campus at Taylor University on rainy fall afternoons and evenings with Radiohead in my ears. I picked “Reckoner” to share with you here because it’s one of my favorites from In Rainbows.
On the Wing by Owl City
Behind Radiohead, which has a very narrow, but important, window of seasonal music listening, Owl City is the next most seasonally-bound musical artist I enjoy. I begin listening to Owl City (and other Adam Young projects like Sky Sailing) as soon as the first warmth of springtime sprouts and then through the summer until around mid-to-late July when other genres take over (more on that later).
Obviously, most people only know Owl City almost as a sort of meme because of the popularity of the hit single “Fireflies,” which has evolved over time from hit song to cringe internet meme fodder to relative irrelevance. However it’s fair to say that Adam Young, the man behind Owl City, means more to me than just about any other musical artist.
There are a lot of reasons why Adam and his work mean so much to me, which I can’t get into in this newsletter because it would go on for far too long, but everything from his musical style to his lyrics have resounded with me for a long time. I came across his music on MySpace in 2008, right around the same time I was getting into trance and electronic music in high school, and his electropop sound combined with his whimsical and romance-adjacent lyrics were exactly what I was looking for in that stage of life. Add on top of that his Christian faith,3 and it was no surprise that Adam (in Owl City and his other projects) became my favorite artist. I have seen Adam perform live six times, I think.
I could have chosen from about a dozen Owl City songs for this, but I went with “On The Wing” because it begins the Maybe I’m Dreaming album, which is the only album Adam had released when I found him on MySpace back in the day. I keep Maybe I’m Dreaming at the top of my Owl City Spotify playlist, so “On The Wing” is always the first song I’m hearing.
Hide And Seek by Imogen Heap
Most fall Fridays in high school, I came home from football practice or school4, hung out with some friends at my house, ate pizza, went to the football game5, came home, and goofed around on the family PC until late into the night. Most often, I was either playing video games, chatting with friends on AIM, listening to music, or writing—usually some combination of those in one way or another.
I’m not totally sure how I had heard of Imogen Heap—surely at school—but I had two songs of hers in my regular rotation on my iTunes playlist: “Goodnight And Go” and “Hide And Seek.” Chances are, if you’ve ever heard a song by Imogen Heap, it’s one of those two…and probably this one.
At this stage of life, I hadn’t really gotten into electronic music yet—that would come soon—but my attraction to the harmonizer/vocoder work in this song was definitely an early indication of an interest in electronic music, to be sure.
The reason “Hide And Seek” means so much to me really has nothing to do with the lyrics, though they are a beautiful reflection on some kind of breakup.
Eating leftover pizza after Friday night football games in front of my family computer as I played video games or wrote while chatting with friends and listening to music is a bittersweet memory for me. I made a ton of memories playing games in that season of life. It was in those late, Friday night writing sessions that I began to develop a love for writing and blogging. But I was sad…for a lot of reasons.
I was still trying to figure out who I was, and I wasn’t sure, and that made me sad. But I was mostly sad because, frankly, I wasn’t cool enough to be invited to all of the after-football-game festivities that others were. The girl I really liked was the cheer captain at a high school across town, and I knew she was spending the rest of her Friday night at campfires with her friends. I knew this because I was texting her throughout.6 That made me sad. And so I listened to music like this and wrote deep into the night.
So, “Hide And Seek” is meaningful to me because it is a sort of artifact of a period of life that was bittersweet and meaningful to me. Even as I listen to that song right now, as I write this, I am teleported back to sitting on a dining room chair in front of a giant wooden computer cabinet in the sunroom of my childhood home, eating leftover pizza, and writing bad blog posts fueled by teenage angst and loneliness, texting the cheerleader across town who would eventually be my wife.
Everybody’s Got a Song by Andrew Peterson
Susie and I first saw Andrew Peterson in concert at a pre-conference event before the Desiring God 2012 conference at Bethlehem Baptist Church in the fall of that year. I had interned at Children Desiring God during the summer, and I wanted to take Susie up to meet all of the friends I had made during my time in Minneapolis, so we signed up to volunteer the event. We worked the registers at the Lifeway Christian Bookstore at the conference. I hadn’t really ever heard of Lifeway before.
We saw Andrew perform and decided that “Dancing Through The Minefields” would be our first dance song at our wedding the next June, but that song is actually not the most important of his for me.
Little did Susie and I know we would move to Nashville in less than a year and live mere miles from Andrew when I took a job at Lifeway Christian Resources during the summer of 2013. We also weren’t aware of his legendary Behold the Lamb of God Christmas tour until a Lifeway co-worker told me not long after we arrived to town in September 2013 that I needed to get tickets to see it at the historic Ryman Auditorium for later that year.
It was at that concert that we heard Andrew sing “Everybody’s Got A Song” for the first time. It’s a song about the wonders of Nashville, sites around town, and the city we have to look forward to in the end.
Susie and I never, ever planned on living in Nashville or anywhere near here. But we’ve spent our whole lives here as a couple—12 years this September. And now I spend most Friday mornings working and writing at Andrew Peterson’s North Wind Manor property with other Christian creatives. It’s hard to believe how much has changed since that concert in Minneapolis.
Every Christmas when we hear Andrew sing this song to kick off the second half of the Behold the Lamb of God show we become less sure we’ll ever leave the city where everybody’s got a song.
Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind
This is a weird song to be on this list because I don’t really like this song. As I stated at the top, I’m not including these songs on this list because they’re favorites or anything, but I have generally liked all of the songs until this one. Now it isn’t that I don’t like this song, I just don’t think I’ve intentionally sought it out to listen to it in well over a decade until writing up this piece.
The reason this song means so much to me is because, like some of the other songs on this list, it enables me to an almost exact time and place in my life, one that wasn’t perfect, but was simpler.
Most summer days when I was a kid looked like waking up, putzing around the house until it was time for lunch, eating lunch (or packing one), then going to the Blackhawk neighborhood pool a couple miles down the road from our house until it was time to come home and get ready for baseball.
The Blackhawk pool scene checked every box on the list of ingredients for summer community pool vibes. Pure Americana. One of the more iconic parts of spending summers in the late 90s and early 00s at Blackhawk pool was the soundtrack of summer it provided.
Most often blaring out of the speakers around the pool were either 97.3 WMEE or MAJIC 95.1. Both stations played what I think is best called “90s Pop Rock.” I say this because this Spotify station may as well be the tracklist for every summer of my childhood at the pool.
I could have picked probably a dozen songs off of the playlist I linked above as the song that is important to me from that time, but this was the first one to come to mind, and I suppose that means something. 7
1979 by Smashing Pumpkins
When I was a kid, most of my best friends in the neighborhood were a few years older than me, and they had even older siblings. I was the oldest in my house growing up, but having older friends in the neighborhood was like having a handful of older siblings—with all the good and bad that comes with older siblings.
One of the cool parts about having some older friends at a young age was exposure to more “mature” music earlier than I typically would have been. I don’t recall any negative side effects of this—I’m not sure there are any stories of me swearing a bunch because of the music I heard—but I guess I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it.
All of that is to say, I remember very clearly hearing the Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness album when I was probably eight or nine years old. The album was released the day before my fifth birthday, but I’m sure I wasn’t listening to it at that age. I am pretty sure I can remember being in one of my friends’ brothers’ bedrooms and coming across this album and popping the CD in the stereo. I remember it so clearly, I think, because of the striking Renaissance-looking album artwork.
Anyway, listening to this album and others at such a young age made it so that my first favorite genre of music I can remember is 90s alternative rock—Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Presidents of the United States of America, and others. This song is a favorite of that time, a time that began my love for music in general. It is a song about all the emotional trappings of youth—happiness, angst, and the rest. A fitting song for a comfy suburban kid who wasn’t quite a teenager, but was hanging around some of them.
There you have it—nine songs that are all important to me for their own reasons. If you happened to actually read down this far, thanks for taking the time. Maybe you found a new song or genre you decided to try.
Feel free to share some songs that are important to you and why in the comments if you’re so inclined. I’m always looking for new ways to increase my Spotify hours. :-)
I intentionally am not including any songs that have spiritual/eternal meaning to me in this list because that could be a list of its own. This list is meant to highlight songs that have been formative for me in a variety of other ways outside of my spiritual development. A list of worship/Christian songs like this will likely follow sometime soon.
Caution: some of them have language, so listen at your own discretion.
He was a longtime attender/member at John Piper’s Bethlehem Baptist Church in the Minneapolis area.
I played JV football my freshman and sophomore years, but then quit after that. It’s a long story. I probably should have stuck with it, but I’m ultimately glad I didn’t.
The Snider High School Panthers are routinely one of the best programs in the state of Indiana.
We’re married now.
“Drive” by Matchbox Twenty and “Mr. Jones” by Counting Crows are two others that came to mind not long after this one, though.