Write Club Prompt #8

The Strokes - Is This It?

My relationship to music is about as odd as my taste in music. Through high school I preferred classic rock and shunned pretty much all other music. If it wasn’t for Little Steven’s Underground Garage I may still be like today. While I can’t recall which song it was I know it was the band the Strokes that first awakened this new sense in me. A sense that I had discovered something new and special and only I knew about it. The band was so new I had to order the CD online. I was a teenage boy so I ordered the UK edition because that cover. Come on.

This is an album that remains special to me. Listening to it now triggers a wave of memories floating in slowly until I’m transported back to those early days. Listening to the DiscMan while sitting around. Walking around the college campus. The early internet days where downloading one song took half an hour. That one time I saw them in concert and Julian walked off the stage and sang a whole song while wondering around the audience. I made eye contact with a waitress who stopped doing her job to watch the show. She smiled at me. Afterward my friends and I stole posters and went for food.

These feelings, they are more than nostalgia. It’s about a time when life was unburdened. Those summers between school sessions when I was free of responsibility. In many ways my life is better now. Even that unburdened feeling of youth can still be found. It’s always waiting for me on an album I love and listened to during those magical summers.