I grew up in a house whose rooms were filled above all with two very particular strains of music: the smooth, syncopated foot-tappings of jazz (Coltrane, Clapton, Davis; Billie, Brubeck, Ella) and the intricate architectures of classical harmonics (Bach, Beethoven, Vivaldi; Mendelssohn, Mozart, Handel). Besides the records that made the speakers shiver, music also meant my father’s sharp, clear whistle angling through the space between his teeth, and my mother’s sweet voice quavering through the hymns of her heart. For many years music—though familiar and beloved, though a friend of mine, though calm and moving and inspiring and every good thing that it still is today—wasn’t really something I could choose, and therefore possess, for myself. All the paths to music I saw laid out before me were marked with the signposts of intellect (I was too childishly sensual), faith (I was too literal), or memory (my past was still the size of a pea underneath a pile of mattresses, and I was no princess).

Don’t get me wrong. I loved music, both as a listener and a producer of song. I was in organized choirs and funny little a cappella choruses with friends; I was obsessed with musicals; I hummed and warbled my way through my awkward years bolstered with the knowledge, some days, that my voice was the prettiest thing about me. But all that music was about other people, other worlds—adult worlds, usually, that were ordered and complete and beautifully, richly mature. Even the hottest jazz seemed that way to me as a kid, since I didn’t have the slightest idea what jazz was about. I didn’t get that music could be an instrument of rebellion. I didn’t get that it could be a secret you held close to your chest, or a bitter raging against the universe. That it could tell you in a single phrase who you always were, or suddenly show you the self you didn’t even know you wanted to be.

Then I became a teenager.

I now realize that I had a wholly ordinary teenage experience, as these things go—I was alternately cruel and passionately affectionate to my fellows, and they were the same to me. I shunned the idea of love and then fell in love with my best friend’s boy, and that was a whole mess. I felt the fear of embarrassment thrilling through every hair on my body during every single second. I turned my back on my parents. I suffered through painful epiphanies every other month. I had an inferiority complex; I had a superiority complex.

What can I say? It was the thing to do. :-)

But if those years held only one gift (and in truth they held many), it was music, music that opened up for me then with such emotional power that it was like a conflagration of exquisite aches. I started listening to the radio every moment I could. Soon I decided the radio was too vanilla for me. I read CD reviews in obscure British and American music magazines every week and delighted in purchasing albums without ever having heard a single track on them. As soon as I bought a new CD I locked my door and put it on, playing it over and over until the order of the songs on it had become as familiar as the thrum of my heart when I lay awake at night. I turned the volume up high. I screamed into my pillow in inchoate rages. I wept for heartbreaks I hadn’t even had properly. Music belonged to me, and I belonged to music, and thank god for all of it.

I was beautifully, irreparably, sixteen. There was no turning back.

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This entry brought to you by My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, whose album “Hit and Run Holiday” I listened to this afternoon while washing the dishes.