I have a habit of calling things my first love, but the truth is, my first love was dance. There is a T. Rex song, “Cosmic Dancer,” and my favorite lyric is, “I danced myself right out the womb.” I, in fact, believe I must have danced right out of my mom’s birth canal. The first dance class I ever took, I fell in love with the fluid relationship between music and dance — every video taken of me it’s clear that I was thrilled to be performing. I began playing the viola in elementary school and continued until the age of 16. As my passion for music and dance grew together, I became a Spotify aficionada and still am to this day, moving through the music that has defined my life.
I have attended all-girls schools my entire life (whoa!) and have experienced a whirlwind of emotions and experiences that come with growing and learning in a single-sex environment. When I was in elementary school, I was quite petite. My child development reports repeatedly emphasized how small my hands were and how I was able to use them with such precision in every crafty activity we did. I did not hit my growth spurt until well into eighth grade, marking me an easy target for girls to mess around with me or my stuff.
Frequently the target of some of my classmates, I felt like a tossed around, limp doll. I confided in my mom, who introduced me to “Tubthumping,” an anthem by anarchist British pop group Chumbawamba. The chorus repeats the same phrase: “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down.”
She told me to sing this to my bully, and in fact, one day in our dining hall, I did. Did that stop her? No, but it did show her, and I did feel empowered to speak my mind, something I continued to develop as I grew. Thanks, mama.
My parents are Gen X’ers, and it is clear by my music and film tastes that they very much raised me on their favorite media from the 80s.
One of my favorite childhood movies is Wolfgang Peterson’s “The Never Ending Story.” Phenomenal soundtrack, compelling storyline, and I totally wanted to be Tami Stronach as the Empress.
This song brings me back to nights spent with my dad and my younger siblings, Daniel and Olivia, watching Limahl’s music video and rewatching the scene of Bastian flying on Falkor’s back to reality.
My dad is one of my biggest music influences — he fostered my love for music videos and used to brush my hair “Farrah Fawcett style” before bedtime, which often included listening to music together.
I began learning Spanish formally in fifth grade. I have loved every Spanish teacher I ever had, but this specific introductory class led me down my lifelong path of learning Spanish.
My favorite activity in class was independent work time, where we got to get the iPads out of the cart and rinky-dink $5 wired headphones to watch Spanish music videos while filling in the blanks of lyrics with the correct verb conjugations.
My absolute favorite song was “A Dios Le Pido” by Juanes, whom I ended up doing a project about in middle school for another class. The music video still plays in my head sometimes as I think about object pronouns and how we were listening to songs like “La Camisa Negra” at age 11.
I was that kid in sixth-grade art class with the same wired headphones and school iPad logged into Spotify, blasting Fiona Apple while struggling to put glass tiles together in mosaic form. Universal experience, right? Well, my love for Ms. Apple has been constant since I was 12. When the album “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” came out in 2020, my quarantine experience was torrentially transformed, for sure. “Shameika” is my favorite song on the album, as I, too, often find myself feeling “pissed off, funny, and warm,” unafraid of “the bullies.”
If you were a Musical.ly fan at any point, you will know this song, but I know it from my favorite piece I have ever danced in. I spent 15 years of my life in ballet, most of those formative years spent at Ballet Jeunesse, a tight-knit family-owned youth dance company in Cleveland, Ohio.
Every spring, we produced a concert for our families and friends, choreographed by our beloved teachers.
The summer before I moved, we performed a piece I had remembered watching as a little kid. It was about navigating “the wolves of life” (literally, I wore a light-up wolf mask) in the company of your people. I know the choreography by heart and even embroidered “New Soul” onto my quilt square for our high school senior class collective quilt (shoutout all-girls school traditions you’ve never heard of).
I found theater the year I moved to Palo Alto, Calif. I was 16, about to start my junior year, leaving behind everything I had ever known in Cleveland, Ohio. The first extracurricular I fell into ended up being my new high school’s theater program. While I have always been a performer, my theatrical pursuits did not extend beyond the required theater classes in middle school. When I auditioned for Clue during the first week of school, I felt so insanely out of my element in the black box with my Charlie Brown monologue.
To think that I ended up doing my senior capstone project in theater amazes me to this day.
Theater became my safe space at a time when I felt so unsure about myself while drowning in crippling academic perfectionism. It was a place where I could take risks and write without feeling like a failure. Indigo de Souza’s “Take Off Ur Pants” encapsulates everything theater gave me, from developing confidence in my voice once more, to feeling okay with not being like “everybody else,” which De Souza explores on the track: “When am I gonna start being cool? Like everybody else is!”
I had a One Direction (1D) resurgence during my junior and senior years of high school. One of my friends at the time was a boy band fanatic — we even saw the Backstreet Boys for like $30, which was huge.
She had all the 1D albums on CD in her car, and we would rotate between them, Avril Lavigne, Taylor Swift and the Backstreet Boys. It was straight out of 2012. They have been there for me since I found out about Larry Stylinson, the “ship” between Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles that started on Tumblr after 1D formed on The X Factor in 2010.
I was a lowkey Larrie in middle school, I fear, but this song brings me back to two critical time periods in my life: growing up attending 1D-themed birthday parties and screaming “Little White Lies” out the windows during college application season.
One of my favorite memories from high school was seeing the David Bowie movie with my friend, Alister — it was not only an exhilaratingly gender-bending experience, but it combined so many of my childhood memories of Labyrinth and listening to “Heroes” with my dad, and every time I’m with Alister, Bowie comes up.
This song is the best song to listen to under any circumstances. I just love how he wants all the children to boogie, as they should. It’s my favorite boogie song, that’s for sure.
“I’m a bad bitch and I got bad anxiety” is the story of my life. My first semester at Grinnell, I was quiet, which would be shocking to anyone who knows me now. I was such an anxious, freshly 18-year-old who was unsure of who she was going to become. I used to listen to this song on repeat, and it has now made its way into my weekly rotation.
It is a raw, upbeat anthem on not letting anyone tell you what to do and figuring out your path on your own.
I am truly obsessed with every line, and I, like Megan, jam to Whitney and sing to Britney. While paying homage to some of her favorite “bad bitches,” she normalizes having bad days, but using Friday through Sunday to “bounce back,” which is exactly how I feel about the week.
Thursday night is layout for The S&B, and that is pressure to the max, but Friday is my chill, do what Zoe needs day, where I do not have classes and can tailor my schedule to fit the “bad bitch” inside of me.
This is that song that plays in the final scene of that indie romance movie that you tell everyone you hate, but you know you love a little too much. I might be thinking of one, iykyk, it is 2008 Twilight! My college best friend and first-year roommate, Julia Ghorai `27, is a Twilight devotee.
Last fall, we watched it with her boyfriend, and it was his first time watching it. It is always a special experience to rewatch a classic late 2000s movie.
During the final scene, when Bella and Edward take each other in their arms, it feels like time stops. All I want to do is start crying, which is not unusual for me at the end of a movie, but at the same time, I just want to dance. It’s an enchanting waltz-like narrative to me and reminds me of some of my favorite people!
Erasure’s synthy queer anthem is so dear to me. I am a lesbian woman, a very sappy Pisces lesbian woman at that.
My girlfriend and I consider this to be “our song.” Like Andy Bell and Vince Clarke write, I believe love is a form of salvation. For me, that’s what our love is.
“We can make love not war” is truly one of my favorite lyrics ever, and I am so obsessed with the fact that it is featured in the iconic lesbian film that is D.E.B.S. My girlfriend only just showed it to me this summer, but watching it with her healed something deep within me as we witnessed Lucy win Amy back as Erasure played in the background.
