[FOOT] Extra Post 1: A [brief] Musical History of Matthew Colwell

As an important staple in my life, I thought spending a few paragraphs chronicling some of the most important bands and records in my life would be worthwhile. As texts in their own right, these songs and albums have shaped me into the person I am today. From as long as I can remember, I found solace in music and literature, and they always helped me better understand myself and the world around me. I wouldn't trade these memories for anything.

My desire to listen to music didn't really start until I was 13. Up to then, I was just listening to boy bands and AC/DC, who my father listened to. But then I went to middle school and everything was revolutionized. While there are a number of records that hit me very quickly in 7th grade, I tend to think it was Box Car Racer's self-titled record that was the first punk rock record I got into. It's a band that features two of the members of pop-punk group Blink-182. They only released that album, but I still listen to it to this day. The rest of middle school was spent delving into old school hardcore records and also getting into different pop-punk acts.

After Box Car Racer, I fell in love with bands like Black Flag and Minor Threat. The song "Rise Above" by the former was a punk rock anthem to live by at that age. They may have been bands from the '80s, but I loved them. They embodied who I was (and still am to a point). It wasn't until a few years later that I read up on that entire scene, but there is a really great book that chronicles this era of music called American Hardcore: A Tribal History by Steven Blush. It recounts from '80-'86 and interviews every huge band from that scene and has great pictures and interviews with them. I've never seen another music scene documented so well. I was also getting into New Found Glory's record Sticks and Stones and listening to Blink-182 like it was my job. In 8th grade, Blink-182's self-titled record came out, and it was one of the first albums I remember lusting after to have ON release date. The last record I remember getting into was during 8th grade, I fell in love with Fall Out Boy's Take This To Your Grave (which turned out to be, sadly, their last great record as they expanded their sound and sold out to the pre-teen audience as they continued to blow up in the public music scene). As middle school came to a close, I had absorbed almost all the hardcore I could take, so high school would take quite the turn for me.

My freshman and sophomore year of high school were mostly spent listening to ska acts like Reel Big Fish and Streetlight Manifesto. I ended up fronting a punk/ska act we called The Underachievers for ~8 months before we broke up. Some of the best times of my life were in that band. Near the end of sophomore year I would start to become good friends with my now best

friend Chris Duxbury, who is a huge metal head. I started to listen to Shadows Fall and Dream Theater a little bit -- albeit I never did end up REALLY into metal, but I came to appreciate it and still like some of those bands. I continued to listen to the records I listened to in middle school and would eventually move onto a now favorite of mine, Dance Gavin Dance during my senior year of high school. The rest is sort of a blur at this point, but I spent most of my senior year listening to that band's record Downtown Battle Mountain and revisiting a lot of '90s emo acts like The Promise Ring and Christie Front Drive. But high school was really only the beginning of my musical journey, because college has completely revolutionized it.

My entire freshman year I was unemployed. Which, as a side note, was miserable. Because of this, the winter of 2008, I opened a blog focusing on music reviews. Over the next year, the blog would blow up into thousands of hits per day and meeting so many people with similar mindsets and crazy palettes of music taste. It's hard to comprehend all the music I listened to that year while I had so much time to and how many bands I've run into since then. Particularly, I fell in love with Minus The Bear, who, to this day, are still my favorite band and there isn't as song by them I don't like to jam to. I started listening to anything I could get my hands on and I finally had people to talk to about it because of the internet. My iTunes exploded and it's really all history since then. I listen to a little bit of everything except for older music of any sort. I never could get into classic rock or metal.

But not only have I just passively listened to these bands and somehow had them influence me. From the musicianship to the lyrics, they have treated me the same way as books have and I hope to integrate music into my classroom when I begin to teach. So much music is influenced by literature and I am certain there will be ways to integrate it into the classroom. I look forward to keeping up with modern music in a way that will help me relate to students and utilize it so they can reach new levels of critical thought and then apply it to their tests and the literature assigned and fall in love with words in the same way they may love movies or music.