Have I always been a music lover? Yes, music and lyrics have been instrumental (pun intended) and integral to me since The Beatles found there way to me when I was 11 going on 12. That was December 1978, eight years after they broke up.

My high school yearbook quotes were lyrics.

Words are flowing out

Like endless rain into a paper cup

They slither wildly as

They slip away across the universe

Pools of sorrow, waves of joy

Are drifting through my opened mind

Possessing and caressing me

(The Beatles, Across the Universe)

Everybody needs love and adventure

Everybody needs cash to spend

Everybody needs love and affection

Everybody needs 2 or 3 friends

(Human League, The Things that Dreams Are Made of)

28 years later (2013) I included the same lyrics plus several others in my first ever piece of self-expository writing, a self-portrait in essay form (posted on Medium shortly after joining https://medium.com/7bdac6f1510e), in which I also said:

"I love how music triggers memories — often bringing me back to a time that now seems simpler and yearned for — but in reality those times were no simpler than the present — maybe it just seems that way because I survived them — because they are safely in the past?"

I remember the first time I heard Human. It was in August or September 2012, while being driven between the residence and the offices of the rehab I attended in Florida. I immediately loved the song. The driver said yeah, she loves The Killers. I hadn't yet heard of them. I'm not one who keeps up with all emerging music even in the genre that has come to be known as alternative, which despite The Beatles being my all-time favorite, is the genre to which I feel gravity's pull (an homage to REM there). Ok, that's enough for this comment. It's the backbone for an essay. Yay. Thank you for the nudge. I'm tingling with excitement now.