This Playlist Sounds Like Me

Two years ago, one of my favorite students wrote her college essay about listening to Saturday Morning Flashbacks on XRT with her parents.

It remains one of the best essays I’ve ever read.

Not because anything enormous happened.

She simply listened to the radio with her parents every Saturday morning. They talked about the music. Her parents told her where they were when they first heard certain songs. She vividly described sitting in the grocery store parking lot, windows down, music up, because you don’t get out of the car before the song ends.

That was the essay. No national championship. No research breakthrough. No life lesson neatly tied up in the final paragraph.

Just a girl, her parents, the radio, and Saturday mornings. And by the end, I knew her. I wanted to be her BFF.

I’ve been thinking about her essay lately because I have been listening to the same playlist on repeat. And because I am knee-deep in personal statements.

As for the playlist, I didn’t make it.

It’s called “Lin Brehmer 1-22-23,” a collection of songs played on XRT after Lin Brehmer died.

For decades, Lin was one of those voices Chicagoans simply knew. The longtime XRT host called himself “your best friend in the whole world,” and somehow, coming through the radio, that didn’t sound remotely ridiculous.

Talking Heads. R.E.M. Pearl Jam. Joni Mitchell. Lyle Lovett. Van Morrison. The Rolling Stones. Muddy Waters. Freddy Jones Band. Wilco.

It is slightly weird. Very Chicago. A little all over the place.

In other words, it feels remarkably like me.

If you’re of a certain age—and I am—you probably had a thirty-pound case of CDs that lived in your car. It survived the summer heat and Chicago winters and was always within reach when you suddenly decided you absolutely had to hear a particular song.

Before that, we waited for songs.

Did you ever stay up late because you knew a song was going to come on the radio and you wanted to record it?

Blank cassette ready. Finger hovering over the record button. God help the DJ who talked over the beginning.

In high school and college, music was somewhat of a love language.

We made mixtapes. Then we burned CDs. You made them for your friends. Someone made one for you. You spent an unreasonable amount of time deciding which song should come first.

I am still upset that I lost a cassette from September 1999 that we played repeatedly during swim practices in high school. I don’t know where it went. I don’t even remember every song that was on it. I would still like it back.

Music has always worked that way for me.

My dad has seen the Rolling Stones nearly every time they’ve played Chicago since 1967. On his 75th birthday, my sister and I took him to see the Stones at Soldier Field. I grew up with them, and with my dad talking to me about them.

The Beatles take me somewhere else: dancing to records with in the Conniff family basement when they babysat me. I was little and didn’t know what to think about music but the people I adored loved it, and thus, so did I.

My youngest sister can hear a song I’ve claimed as mine for years and tell me a completely different story about it. Same song. An entirely different place.

And then there was XRT.

At some point, XRT became the music that was always there for you. In the morning. In the car. Getting ready for work. Driving to school.

Lin (and Mary Dixon) was there, too.

You didn’t tell XRT what you wanted to hear. Nobody asked you to choose between “Chill Mix” and “Feel Good Favorites.”

Someone else decided what came next.

Sometimes you thought, What the hell is this?

And sometimes you heard something you never would have chosen for yourself and loved it for the next thirty years.

That’s still what I want.

Put the Rolling Stones next to the Beatles. Follow them with something I’ve never heard before. Then throw in Wilco for good measure.

I’ll be happy. And I think I understand even better now why I loved my student’s essay so much.

She wasn’t really writing about Saturday Morning Flashbacks.

She was writing about herself through something that had always been there.

We ask teenagers to tell us who they are in 650 words, and they immediately start looking for the biggest story they have.

The biggest accomplishment.

The biggest challenge.

The biggest moment.

Sometimes I wish they’d look for the most familiar one instead.

What feels most like you?

For my student, it was Saturday mornings listening to XRT with her parents.

Apparently, for me these days, it’s this Lin Brehmer playlist.

I put it on. A song I haven’t heard in years comes up. I know it within three notes.

Oh, I love this.

Slightly weird. Very Chicago. A little all over the place.

Remarkably like me.