paved by songs

On my first birthday I was living in a Dalmatian village with my grandparents, uncle, aunt and cousins, while my parents lived and worked in Germany. My uncle Grgo had a song played for me on Radio Metkovic, in a show that played music by listeners' request. The song was 'Tata kupi mi auto' ('Dad, buy me a toy car') and I reportedly sat by the radio while the song played and repeated 'tata, tata, tata', quite out of rhythm. That is the earliest anecdote about my relationship with music that I know of.  When I turned three I joined my parents in Munich, Germany, and quite soon became fascinated by German schlagers. No Saturday night could go by without me religiously watching Hitparade on TV, and then singing the songs with a few other kids in kindergarten on Monday morning. When we were leaving Germany and moving to my father's homeland of Montenegro, dad asked me to choose a present that I could take to our new home, and I said without hesitation - an A...

In October 1995 I started working as a teaching assistant at the University of Montenegro's English Department. The subjects I was teaching at the time included conversation classes that I shared with an even younger colleague, Charlotte from England, who was still an undergraduate student of South Slavic languages in London. It was a fun but also an incredibly busy period with the new job and the exams in the postgraduate studies that I had enrolled in.  I carefully prepared my classes and I loved my job, but one day was particularly busy for me to sit down and make a detailed plan for a conversation lesson, so I decided ad hoc  just to talk about music. There is so much to be said about it, myriad of songs have soaked my life and been a soundtrack to innumerable moments, both life-changing and immensely trivial, and I supposed that people 3-4 years younger than I wouldn't be able to hold their horses and would chatter about music on and on. So, why would I need a plan? ...