Six Songs of Me

So The Guardian recently launched a project about Music and its effect on our lives. 

In Six Songs of Me, they asked people to key in basic personal information such as age, sex, occupation, etc. and answers to the following questions: 

1.) What was the first song you ever bought? 
2.) What song always gets you dancing? 
3.) What song takes you back to your childhood? 
4.) What is your perfect love song? 
5.) What song would you want at your funeral? 
6.) Encore: One last song that makes you, you. 

I keyed in my answers but it was too bad they were tied-up with spotify and spotify did not have Filipino songs in their library. So even if my answers can't be part of the social survey, it was fun exercise which got me thinking about my six song and the memories associated with them. NPR ran an article which elicited thousands of responses about other people's six songs here and here. The results of the survey are still being consolidated 

So what do the soundtracks to my life tell me about either music or myself? Musicologist Eric Clarke writes, "Well, they bring home that strange combination of serendipity and revelation that so often characterises our encounters with music: those BBC advertisements for the proms in which a passerby steps into an invisible circle of sound and is suddenly transfixed and transported tap into a particular preoccupation with 'the secret power of music' which is both profoundly ideological and all too real." 

Hmmm. That didn't clear things up. It's still pretty conceptual to me. I do know, though, that music for me has always been a companion of sorts. Like a friend who cheers you up or sympathizes with you. Someone who jolts you out of stupor or calms you down. A provocateur or peacemaker. Or just someone you like to hang around with. 

I'm the kind of person who almost always has background music on, except when I'm writing. It was weird to discover that not everybody was like that. During a trip to the province, I hitched a ride with my aunt and, for 10 hours, the radio was turned off. I didn't have a radio/mp3-enabled phone with me then.  That was the only time I profoundly missed music. I hope that never happens again under any circumstance. 


My Answers: 

First song ever bought (...with my own money, that is. It was probably Joey Albert or Lea Salonga I first asked my mom to buy for me. Haha. I also had FrancisM and After Image tapes before this): 

Song that gets me dancing:

Song that takes me back to my childhood:

Perfect love song: 

Song for my funeral: 

Song that makes me, me: