This Must Be The Place

I went to college in the early 2000s, a time when your music collection lived inside giant zippered CD binders that occupied the passenger seat of your car like a second person.

If someone climbed into your car, they didn’t ask what kind of music you liked. They just started flipping through your collection.

That terrified me.

Music wasn’t just entertainment back then. It was an identity test. Every album was another sentence in your autobiography, and I wasn’t entirely convinced mine belonged to me.

I grew up in a house where one parent played the Beatles on repeat. Another bounced between Whitney Houston and Bette Midler. One brother loved the Beastie Boys. Another couldn’t get enough Boyz II Men.

I absorbed all of it.

The problem was, I never stopped to ask what I liked.

Being the youngest child is a strange balancing act. You’re constantly fighting to be heard while simultaneously hoping no one notices you’re still figuring yourself out.

So I drove around with a CD collection that sounded more like my family than myself.

I didn’t know it then, but I was about to get the chance to write a different story.

Sophomore year, someone stole it.

Well... sort of.

There wasn’t a shattered window. No dramatic crime scene. Just an unlocked door and two missing CD binders. Somewhere in Dallas, someone thought they’d hit the jackpot.

I’ve often wondered what went through his head as he flipped through my collection.

“Wait... Bette Midler?”

Honestly... He would’ve been right.

At the time, it felt like someone had stolen my identity.

Looking back, losing my music was the first time I got to choose myself.

For the first time, I had to decide what belonged in my collection instead of simply replacing what I’d lost. So I started paying attention. Not just to music.

To people.

I looked around campus at the people I thought were interesting and wondered what they were listening to.

A fraternity brother told me to listen to Led Zeppelin. I felt like I was being introduced to a cooler version of myself, someone who could bust down walls with a look or a note. Someone who wasn’t afraid to be exactly who he was.

A manic-pixie-dreamgirl whose name I never learned walked past me wearing a Bob Seger T-shirt. She never looked my way. Never said a word. Somehow she introduced me to an artist who made ordinary people sound legendary.

I wanted to know those people.

Fuck, I wanted to become one of them.

I discovered Talking Heads while crushing on a classmate at a bar that had once been owned by Jack Ruby.

Yep... that Jack Ruby.

“This Must Be the Place” came on, and I wanted to be the kind of person who already knew that song.

It wasn’t just the music.

It was the feeling.

For the first time in my life, I understood what love could sound like.

From that moment on, every time I thought I wanted to tell someone I loved them, that song quietly started playing somewhere in the back of my head.

Years later, my wife and I had our first conversation while playing kickball.

Somewhere between that game, our first date, and the life we’ve built together, I realized something.

This must be the place.

Looking back, I don’t think music ever described who I was.

It was introducing me to people I hadn’t become yet.

We all have moments where our taste is formed. Most of us just don’t notice them. Mine happened because I forgot to lock my car.

As I rebuilt that CD collection, I was unknowingly rebuilding something else. Not just my taste. Myself.

And I’ve realized since then that life keeps asking us to do exactly that. Careers end. Friendships change. Families grow. Dreams evolve.

Again and again, we’re handed empty shelves and asked, “Okay... what belongs here now?”

Twenty years later, I found myself doing something that, at first glance, had nothing to do with that stolen CD collection.

I started posting a Song Of The Day on Instagram.

I made a few rules for myself.

One new song every day. No repeating artists. No comfort zone.

It looked like a music challenge. Looking back, I think it was something else.

It was nineteen-year-old me, still rebuilding what was stolen.

Still searching. Still discovering.

Maybe that’s what music has always been.

Not a soundtrack to who we are.

A preview of who we’re becoming.

It turns out I wasn’t rebuilding a CD collection all those years ago.

I was learning how to become myself.

One song at a time.