Thank you for the music (Thanksgiving 2021)

No, you don’t understand, and I couldn’t truly describe how much I love pop music. Maybe you do too. You listen to music in your car and when you jog; in solitude and when you have friends over. I do that too of course. You have your favorite artists, songs, and albums; some are associated with certain age or life memories; some are very special.

Still, I can’t describe exactly the soothing, heavenly effect music has on me; I felt it the same when I was a child, and now decades later.

I’m a non-native English speaker. Listening to rock and pop music has helped as much in mastering English as reading.

I wrote a little about my love affair with Western pop and rock music in this story, about how I discovered it as a child growing up in Soviet Moscow, thanks to my dad, how I later continued exploring it in the 1990s by listening to Russia’s first FM radio stations (thank you, Casey Kasem! Rest in peace!), then during my years in England, then — well forever after.

I don’t even know how to cover in a single story the breadth of what I love, the timeline of my discovery of what is now in my iPhone music library.

But I’ll try noting some highlights.

1990

This one is actually about Russian rock music. We were in a hotel — on vacation in Estonia, then still part of the USSR — when the evening news showed details of a car crash killing Victor Tsoi, the leader of Kino, Russia’s most prominent…