[Music Memories] the same favorite band
Written for Bear Blog Carnival September 2026: Music memories hosted by James.
Content warnings: psychiatric abuse
I've had the same favorite band for twelve or thirteen years now. Marianas Trench. I've found other musical interests in that time, and lost some too. But I never quite got done with the band I found around age fifteen, in the last few years before I lost my sense of exploration.
I've heard it said that nearly everyone's most intense musical loves happen between ages fourteen and sixteen. I don't think that needs to be true, whether or not it usually is true; I'd like to think it's something about how our culture processes teenagers into adults, more than an essentialized quality of the teenage brain. Also, I don't think everyone lost their willingness to try new things to the same extent I did, by the time I turned eighteen.
Not everyone was prescribed, against their will, an increasingly powerful cocktail of psychotropic drugs, over the course of their high school education. Not everyone was institutionalized for a year due to behaviors the adults around me refused to tolerate. Sorry, "due to severe mental health issues". Maybe most people do lose their ability to love music so fiercely and passionately, before the point of legal adulthood, but not quite like me.
All right, all right, enough depressing stuff. Let's back up to my cringey teenage YouTube habits. Specifically, let's talk about the fanvid that got me into Marianas Trench.
"Fandomstuck~ Wholock" (that's the YouTube link to the video itself) is a slideshow of fanart, as if the main characters of Sherlock and Doctor Who were both characters in the world of Homestuck, and also in love. Years later, I still sort of remember the convoluted internet rabbit hole that got me to this video. But the exact chain of hyperlink causation matters less than my teenage willingness to click link after link, not knowing what I'd find, until I found the exact thing I didn't realize I was looking for. Not a video with nice art of Sherlock and the Doctor flirting and kissing; I'm sure there's a zillion of those but I wasn't actually big into either of those shows. What I found was the band that would sustain me, long enough at least to get me here.
I watched a lot of these kinds of videos across various fandoms, partly for the fanart, partly because they were a fun way to find new music. If I didn't like a song, I still might watch through a video to see art of characters I liked. And if I stuck with a video long enough to see all the art, maybe I'd find myself liking the song more than I realized I would. It was a good system, especially because YouTube ads weren't as bad then and I didn't have streaming music yet. I'm sure I watched a bunch of fanvids that were pretty forgettable, but there's a few besides this one that I still remember.
Sitting on the living room couch with my mom's laptop, finding new music. Most of the good memories back then are basically like that: finding new media and going off alone to enjoy it. New webcomics, linked from tumblr posts and from other webcomics' recommendations pages. New books, manga, and graphic novels from the public library, the school library, the bookstore, the comic book store. Reading in my room, reading in the park, reading whenever I had a spare moment at school. Putting in my earbuds and going out for walks, with my new favorite songs driving the rhythms I moved to.
I didn't have a lot else back then to keep the "dysregulated emotions" and "distorted thinking patterns" from spilling out to where grownups could see them. I tried not to be what they didn't want me to be, but it turns out most people can't live on art and fiction alone. We need other people who give us the kinds of care we need, not just the kinds they assume are sufficient. So I fucked up one too many times, and I was taken away to where I didn't have internet or bookstores or libraries, where my iPod time and even my comics time were rationed out as incentives for compliance. Sorry: as "privileges I had to earn by using skills appropriately."
My one line to the outside world, beyond Skype family therapy and supervised phone calls, was that my iPod had radio signal using the headphone jack as an antenna. Not everyone's did, but lucky me, I wasn't just stuck with the music I'd arrived with. There were three Top 40 stations within range, one alternative/indie rock, and one pop-country. So I got into indie rock and pop-country, basically out of necessity, because the more stations I was willing to listen to, the less of my precious iPod time I had to spend listening to ads.
So I listened to whatever music my iPod radio could reach, and whatever I'd had on there when I arrived. I even got new comics every once in a while. Otherwise, I re-listened and re-read and tried to be okay in a world where I got less of the care I needed than ever. And I made it through, but when I got back out into the world... something in me had changed.
I found myself with this aversion to trying new things, even if there was no reason to expect I wouldn't like them. It wasn't this absolutely insurmountable thing to go read or listen to something new, but there was this resistance I'd never had before. Even if I found a good book, a good song, I'd have to force myself to sit through it. I could hold in my head that I was enjoying something, and still feel this urge to pull away from the sensation.
I learned, in the troubled teen institution- oh sorry, the "therapeutic boarding school"- that it wasn't safe to feel much of anything at all. Any sort of emotional experience is too much to bear when you expect to be overstimulated, overworked, overwhelmed at all times. Stories I knew, songs I knew, those were safe and well-understood. Better to loop the same thing until I couldn't feel anything about it anymore, than to try something new that might hurt my feelings. Or worse, might revive something vulnerable and inconvenient that needed to keep its head down and not cause problems.
So my favorite band at fifteen is still my favorite band at twenty-eight. And Marianas Trench are great, they're worth having stuck around for, but...
I wonder if the reason other people stop falling so hard for new music is a lower-severity version of the same reason I did. Maybe the older you get, the scarier it is to let some big new sound blow into your life and turn everything upside down, the way teenagers can do so easily. You know, at the exact point of life when it's most societally-tolerated for people to dramatically reinvent themselves. I'd like to think it's not impossible for any of us to hear a new song and let it carry us forward into someone new, at any point in life. It might be harder, but none of us are done changing yet.
I'm not done changing yet.
Maybe, if I write something else about music, I'll tell you about Nxdia or Dorian Electra or Shea Diamond or Sarah and the Safe Word. Or maybe I'll be someone else by then. I think I already am someone else, honestly, and my taste in music just hasn't caught up yet. I'm a little slow to find new music, after all. And I don't know what kind of music the new Liza Rose might like.
But there's something out there for her. I'm sure there is. I don't think the fanvid makers are on YouTube anymore, but maybe I'll suck it up and finally join TikTok. Maybe I'll turn up my nose at the algorithm and figure out how to dig stuff up on Bandcamp or SoundCloud. Who knows? There's a whole world out there, and maybe I can teach myself to not be scared of it anymore.