Welcome, strangers, to the birth of my life as a music blogger.  In the next few posts I'll be putting up my best of lists for 2007 as an introduction to my musical leanings, but first and foremost, I thought it prudent to give you a little introduction to myself.

Weezer, "Teenage Victory Song"

I've been a Nashvillian for the last fifteen years of my life.  I grew up in the suburbs listening to The Who's Tommy on cassette and watching Empire Records nonstop.  I simultaneously loved Talking Heads and The Ataris.  When I was fifteen I made friends with the most handsome boy and the coolest girl I had ever met by writing Thursday lyrics in my planner.  We made buttons out of laffy taffy wrappers in my bedroom and had my dad drop us off at Indienet to see some local band thrash around and sweat for a few hours.  Later we'd gush about how we'd been kicked in the head by a crowd surfer.  We thought we were so damn cool.

Built to Spill, "Car"

I bought Built to Spill's There's Nothing Wrong With Love for twelve dollars at a Borders because I recognized it from a poster on my European History teacher's wall.  I found a crowd of kids who thought about life the way I did, and we spent two weeks mourning Elliott Smith's death and watching Wes Anderson films after school.  We tricked the DJ into playing "Idioteque" and "Deceptacon" at our junior year prom.  I spent a hundred dollars on Fugazi albums after learning I had gotten an A in my impossible calculus AP class.  Music marked us.  It measured our successes and failures.  It judged the strength of our loves.  We made out to Beulah and Portishead.  We danced to Muse and Le Tigre.  We drove around with the windows down and In the Aeroplane Over the Sea on repeat.  

Animal Collective, "The Purple Bottle"

I thought I'd go north to college, but Brown waitlisted me and I ended up at Vanderbilt, wooed by the green of March and some guy with glasses who said hello to me.  A good friend of mine who had come to Vandy a year before me also offered me this enticement: "You can go to some alternative school and find a thousand people just like you, or you can come here and make people understand why you love what you do.  I prefer it here."

Cinerama, "Careless"

Enter Vanderbilt University, in the heart of Nashville, and enter two thousand mingling faces just beginning to gain color and form.  Enter a brief fling with a guy with a wall full of Modest Mouse and Ryan Adams posters.  Enter a warped relationship with the most sharp-tongued, elitist, self-defeating man I have ever met.  He turned me on to Cinerama and The Hold Steady.  When upset he'd play The Format on repeat for days at a time, which might account for why I've never really cared for them.  He is, to date, by far the coolest person I have ever slept with.

Didley Squat, "Tigerlily"

Enter also WRVU 91.1, Nashville's beloved college radio station and my sanctuary.  I trained my freshman year and started my own show that December.  When I entered the station for my first solo time behind the board, three of our four microphones weren't working and I couldn't find a set of headphones anywhere in the station.  It's been a steady climb from chaos to sanity, but that's the charm of college radio, right?  WRVU is populated with hipsters and hippies, metalheads and sorority girls, high schoolers and grandfathers.  Our shows range from hipbilly to dance to Persian music.  Vanderbilt hardly knows we exist, but Nashville is good to us, and there's absolutely nothing better than having someone stop you on the street, point at your t-shirt and say "WRVU!  It's all I listen to!  What's your show?"

Wax Fang, "The Doctor Will See You Now"

So here we are.  I'm entering my third year as a DJ, my sixth semester at Vanderbilt, my sixteenth year in Nashville.  And I'm finally doing something I've wanted to do for about three years now--starting this blog.  I'm hoping to make this an extension of the radioshow, and I'll try to do the same things with this that I do with it--share the music I love, share the music you love, and keep it personal.

So, thanks for reading.  Wish me luck.