The Songs We Inherit: How Our Families Shape Our Music Taste

Most of us can probably name the first artist we chose to love.

The album we bought with our own money. The band whose posters went on the bedroom wall. The artist who felt completely and utterly ours.

But our musical story usually starts much earlier than that.

Before we were choosing what to listen to, somebody else was choosing for us.

Music was playing in the kitchen. In the car. At family parties. From a parent's record collection. Through the bedroom wall of an older sibling.

And without really noticing it, we were building the first few tracks of our own soundtrack.

The music we grow up with

Every family seems to have its artists.

The ones whose albums were always somewhere in the house. The songs everyone knew the words to. The record that appeared at every party or the cassette that seemingly lived permanently in the car.

As children, we don't necessarily appreciate any of it.

In fact, there are probably plenty of us who spent our teenage years rolling our eyes at our parents' music, only to find ourselves voluntarily listening to exactly the same songs twenty years later.

Funny how that happens.

Because somewhere along the way, their music becomes part of our music too.

The songs that belong to people

Sometimes a song becomes so closely associated with somebody that it's almost impossible to separate the two.

You don't just hear the song.

You see your dad driving the car.

Your mum singing in the kitchen.

Your grandad putting a record on.

Your brother playing the same album for approximately the 400th time.

Music gives people their own unofficial theme songs.

And years later, hearing one can bring that person straight to mind before you've even reached the chorus.

The record collections we inherit

There was something wonderfully revealing about looking through someone else's music collection.

Rows of vinyl. Towers of CDs. Homemade tapes with slightly questionable handwriting.

You could learn quite a lot about someone from the music they'd accumulated.

There were the albums you'd expect to find — and then occasionally something that made you think:

You listened to this?!

Those collections were little musical histories.

And whether we've physically inherited those records or simply absorbed the music that came from them, pieces of those collections often end up following us through life.

Then we find our own soundtrack

Of course, there comes a point when we start branching out.

Friends introduce us to artists.

We hear something on the radio.

We discover a band and become convinced nobody has ever understood their music quite as profoundly as we do.

Our tastes change, expand and occasionally go through phases we'd rather not discuss.

But those early influences rarely disappear completely.

You might end up loving music your parents would never have listened to, while still knowing every word to the songs they played when you were eight.

That's the interesting thing about a personal soundtrack.

It's partly discovered and partly inherited.

The music we pass on

And then, for many of us, something strange happens.

We become the person choosing the music.

We're the one putting songs on in the car, playing albums around the house and declaring that somebody really needs to hear this track.

Children hear music that was released decades before they were born and somehow know all the words.

Old songs find new audiences.

An artist loved by one generation becomes part of another generation's story for completely different reasons.

The soundtrack keeps moving.

If your family had a soundtrack...

What would be on it?

Which artist immediately makes you think of one of your parents?

Was there an album that seemed to be permanently playing when you were growing up?

Which songs did someone introduce you to that you still listen to today?

And perhaps the more interesting question:

Which parts of your own soundtrack are you passing on?

Because the music we love isn't created in isolation.

It's shaped by people, places, discoveries and memories. Some songs we find ourselves. Some are handed to us without us ever realising it.

And sometimes the music we once thought belonged to somebody else quietly becomes part of our story too.

Music. Memories. Moments.