Kipilefti

Music has always been important to me, something that I strongly associate with specific times of my life. Listen to Elvis Costello’s album ‘My Aim Is True’ and I find myself driving my beloved yellow Volvo station wagon along the windy mountain roads surrounding State College, PA; ‘Kojak Variety’ finds me a bit later that summer, driving a rental car very fast along the broad, straight highways around Phoenix. Put on Doves’ ‘The Last Broadcast’ and I’m in the back seat of a rental van with my family, plugged into my CD player with a teenager’s sullen conviction that I’m right, watching the sunflower fields of southern France fly by outside the window. The Wailin’ Jennys’ ‘Firecracker’ is the trip up to Acadia I took senior fall with two friends; Alison Krauss & Union Station’s ‘New Favorite’ is sophomore fall, hunched over my computer in my dorm room, driving my roommate crazy listening to the album on repeat as I tried to get over a break-up. The soundtrack for our post-graduation road trip was Brad Paisley’s “I’m Still a Guy”, which played–seemingly on repeat–on every country radio station we listened to. We initially greeted it with cheers and then, one by one, began to groan as we heard the first notes.

In the kitchen today, iPod on shuffle, I tried to figure out what the soundtrack to Tanzania would be. Dar Williams’ ‘The Beauty of the Rain’? Sugarland’s ‘Enjoy the Ride’? Amy Winehouse? Beck? The Cowboy Junkies? Eddie from Ohio? Ollabelle? I won’t know what my Tanzania soundtrack is, I realized, until after the fact. I won’t know until I’m at home, in a context that is definitely not here, and the first few notes of a song transport me to a bus on a bumpy road, the top of the mountain between here and where my sitemates live, my bed covered in two purring cats.

I kind of can’t wait to know what it’ll be.