Kimberlee K.

I spent a lot of time in my teens and twenties perusing the music aisles at Target.

Aisles, plural, because they used to be rather sweeping. Sorted by genre and alphabetized, I could lose time tip-tapping my fingers through each stack, looking for names I recognized and covers that caught my eye.

I had slots open in my CD case, and I wanted anyone who rode in my car to have the chance to find something they liked. Sometimes I even bought CDs with the sole intention to impress potential passengers, toeing the line of learning my musical taste and hoping, somehow, it was “correct.”

This continued when I learned how to download music, and again when enough firewalls were put in place to scare me into buying it. Soon, my iTunes library became one of my most prized possessions, and afternoons that should have been spent doing homework were dedicated to making lists on old legals pads of every album I’d heard spoken about, hungry to know and listen to them all.

I have never been musical, never considered myself someone who understood music at a deeper level than anyone else, but I knew it gave me something. Offered me something. And I was grateful, even before I knew what I was looking for, that I had the instinct to look.  

The first CD I ever bought was Jesse McCartney’s Beautiful Soul, and I remember being most excited that I would have the title track at my fingertips and no longer have to rely on Carson Daly (and a timely arrival home after school) to see it played on TRL.

Soon after, I got Kelly Clarkson’s Breakaway, and began my back seat lip-synching career, mouthing the words with as much passion as I could muster while watching raindrops race down the windows of my family’s minivan.

On long drives, my sister and I would trade CDs from our growing collections, offering Avril Lavigne’s Complicated for Evanescence’s Fallen for Britney Spears’ In the Zone. Each album offering me a new element I was attracted to, be it an emotional lyric, a catchy beat, or an epic guitar riff.

In college, I bought Parachute’s Losing Sleep, Hozier’s self-titled debut, and fun’s Some Nights and they, alongside the mixtapes I curated by mood, became defining soundtracks of that period.

Now I religiously tune in for New Music Friday, and my Spotify library is filled with pre-saved albums. The hunger to be in the know is still alive and well, but it’s matched, if not entirely overpowered, by the hope that an artist has found a way to say something I’ve always wanted to.

I am constantly on the edge of my seat, wondering if/when there will be an album that weaves itself into the very fabric of my life, making it mine in a way that is hard to explain to someone who doesn’t feel the same way.

So even though music and the way we hear it keeps changing, I have faith that it will also stay the same. That somehow, some way, the things we are looking for will find us, whether it’s in the aisle of a store or amongst the infinity of an app.

I have faith because, at one point, I didn’t know there would be Golden Hour by Kacey Musgraves, which I now play every time I get on plane because it makes me feel safe.

I have faith because it was an ordinary day when I first heard Sidelines by Wild Rivers, which became a little stitch tying me together with a long-distance friend.

It was an ordinary day when I found Good Person by Ingrid Andress which would walk me through a season of confusion and grief.

On any ordinary day there is a song or an album or an artist to find that can make the world make a little more sense. So I keep that archaeological eye open, willing to be patient, to keep looking.