What’s a song that changed your life?
Nobody asks “what song changed your life?” expecting an honest answer. They are expecting a beautiful one. The question arrives wearing a linen suit and holding a glass of something aged, and it wants you to say Nina Simone. Or Bob Marley. Or a Miriam Makeba record your mother played on a Sunday while the house smelled of mandazi and discipline.
I know this because I have watched people answer it. Their eyes go soft. They mention a road trip, a heartbreak, a grandmother. Somebody always says Fela Kuti and then nods slowly, as if the rest of us should now observe a short silence.
So when the question came to me, I did what any sensible person does. I panicked, and then I started auditioning answers.
The auditions
My first instinct was to claim something with gravitas. A hymn, perhaps. I coordinate services at church, so a hymn would be on brand, and nobody would dare follow up. But the truth is that the hymns I love most are the ones I love because the congregation finally hits the harmony in verse three, and that is a story about other people’s talent, not my transformation.
Next I considered a Kenyan classic. Something from the early 2000s, when I was starting out in banking and every matatu in Nairobi was a mobile concert with questionable brakes. I could say a song from that era “shaped my ambition.” Did it? No. It shaped my hearing. I still have a slight ringing in my left ear from a Rongai route, and I consider that a souvenir, not a turning point.
Then there was the sophisticated option: jazz. I could name a saxophone piece, describe it as “the soundtrack to my thinking,” and watch everyone assume I have a reading nook. I do not have a reading nook. I have a corner of the sofa where the cushions have given up.
Finally, I considered lying outright and saying something by Whitney Houston, because Whitney is always a safe answer and nobody has ever been judged for it. But I would have had to invent a memory, and at my age inventing memories is risky. I might start believing them.
The confession
The song that changed my life is “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor. Yes. The one from Rocky. The one that plays in every gym, every cheap motivational video, and at least one corporate team-building event where a grown man in a lanyard punched the air.
It did not change my life in 1982, when it came out. It did not change my life in my twenties, when I was too busy being serious to be moved by a song with that many guitar stabs. It changed my life this year, at the edge of a swimming pool, a few weeks before I turned fifty.
Here is the situation. I had joined my employer’s swim team for the interbank games, which is the kind of decision you make when you want to feel young and forget that water does not care about your job title. I could swim. What I could not do was dive. Head first, into water, on purpose, with people watching. My body had a firm policy against it, and my body had held that policy for roughly forty years.
So I stood on the edge of the pool doing what I always do before something frightening: negotiating. Maybe next session. Maybe the water is colder today. Maybe diving is overrated and the real athletes just slide in gracefully like otters.
And then, from somebody’s phone speaker near the changing rooms, that opening riff started. Dun. Dun dun dun. You know the one. I have no idea who played it. I like to think it was fate, but it was probably a teenager with a workout playlist and no sense of occasion.
I went in head first. Badly. A splash the shape of a disappointed starfish. But I went.
What it changed, exactly
Nothing about the song is deep. That is the point. The song did not ask me how I felt about diving. It did not invite me to journal. It did not suggest I unpack why a woman who has sat across from regulators and CEOs was being bullied by a swimming pool. It simply announced, at high volume and with no sense of proportion, that it was time to go.
And I have come to believe that most of the things I have put off in my life were not waiting for insight. They were waiting for a riff.
Since the dive, “Eye of the Tiger” has been deployed in the following situations, with mixed results:
- Replying to an email I had been avoiding for eleven days. Success.
- Attempting the butterfly stroke, which I am still learning and which the water still finds hilarious. Partial success. I moved forward. Eventually.
- Getting out of bed for a morning swim in July, when Nairobi decides to be a fridge. Success, but only after the chorus.
- Walking into a meeting where I knew someone had already decided the answer was no. Success. They still said no, but I said my piece with the energy of a woman who has a montage behind her.
- Opening a Google Sheet with more than twelve tabs. Failure. Some things are beyond music.
I have also discovered that my family now hears the riff and scatters, because they know it means I am about to Do Something, and Doing Something at my age sometimes involves them. That is a side effect. I accept it.
Here is the real lesson, buried where my humor writer self cannot stop me. At fifty, the big fears are rarely about the thing itself. The dive was two seconds. The fear was four decades. A ridiculous song shortened the gap between deciding and doing to roughly the length of a guitar intro, and that turns out to be the only gap that matters.
Your turn, and be honest
So that is my answer, and I will be giving it at dinner parties from now on with my chin up. Not Nina Simone. Not a grandmother on a verandah. A 1980s rock anthem about a boxer, played by a stranger’s phone, at a pool, at an age when I should have known better.
I suspect many of us have a song like this and have been hiding it behind a more respectable one. The song that actually got you out of the car and into the interview. The one you played in the bathroom before the hard conversation. The one you will never admit to on a podcast.
Tell me what it is. I promise not to judge, unless it is a ringtone, in which case I have questions.
Leave a Reply