I can understand why you would want to soundtrack your life, queer little man that you are, but all my soundtracks are incidental.
I would say that my character was completely and fully developed by the time I was 10 or 11, and all development after that point has to be qualified as the talismanic restriction of its fullness. I long to be released from my seals and at liberty to do the unsociable things I did then whether or not I was allowed to. The most important songs in my life are important either for being around at moments of freedom or at moments in the process of binding. Most of them are not on youtube.
Here's one that splits the difference:
The Unforgettable Fire was the last U2 album that helplessly sounded naive (all later naivete was by art and prescription.) The wide-open notes in A Sort Of Homecoming, and the excellent drumming! It was always on when I was bounding across frosted fields at twilight or in the depths of the night, totally fearless and ready to accept the providence of civilization as a nonbinding gift. I was more than a little feral at this stage of life, gleefully showing up at pubilc events in rags and paying for everything with sacks of scavenged pennies, inviting myself into other people's lives only browse through their snacks, use the bathroom, and depart without saying anything. I was also quite violent.
My parents were well-off so it wasn't an issue of money. It was more like a completely trusting expectation that other people were bound to provide for me, and I could do whatever I liked with myself. It was also about this time that civilization dropped the hammer on me and made to say that I would have to straighten up or else. So I would also play this song to comfort myself with the idea that there was nothing wrong with being the way I was.
A binding song. I would listen to it on the bus ride into a job that I was good at but where everyone, without fail, to a man, loathed my existence. It was a signal to put away all the things that I found interesting and worthwhile, or be mocked for them. Once I wouldn't have minded being mocked since I could always just go and crush the mockers, but when you become an adult and work for a living, all that goes away. You have to sit there and take it, especially if the boss and the boss' boss participate. It took me too long to figure out that I could just quit; I thought all that bullying nonsense was a puzzle that I had to figure out.
I retained only my self-righteousness - itself talismanic, righteousness being an eternally acceptable excuse to behave badly (and the eventual reason that I was fired.) I even cut my hair for that job. The hairdresses took off so much, and it was only just skimming my shoulders at the end. Another seal! I grew it back out as soon as I was fired.
Anyway this song and really that whole album remind me of elvishness getting crushed and then dying. As a LOTR extra you can probably understand how horrible it felt.
A song of freedom seeping up through the cracks.
In late high school I was coping pretty badly with things like getting to drive and having money that I didn't steal or pillage - I took everything too far and got into lots of car accidents and bought only things of superfluous senselessness (enormous sets of books on scientific Russian vocabulary, or dozens and dozens of roses, or bunches of pillows just to jump on, lunch for everyone in the restaurant, etc.) I was also coping pretty badly with the end of the permissiveness that adults extend to children and I hated being made to feel responsible for anything. My parents were getting divorced, which affected me chiefly in that my faith in true eternally-enduring love was shaken - a big deal then, and still a big deal. Love is very important.
Outside was my album of choice for all-night drives to nowhere. In listening to it, and especially to the title track, Wishful Beginnings, and The Hotel, I felt that there was a method for retaining my powers and permissions even in a world that seemed totally set on neutering them and replacing them with powers and permissions I cared nothing for (ex: having a job, getting along with friends, being well thought of.)
I felt that in the splendid sweeping anthemic sound (or in the queer retrograde texture of Wishful Beginnings) I heard a side of the world that wouldn't consider me out of order at all. It lent confidence to my suspicion that everyone else was wrong in their beige orderliness, and that I was right to be a stone cold scary weirdo.
