Immersed in Music, Save for a Fifteen-Year Gap

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 ABBA casette. He bought me two, 'Arrival' and ABBA's greatest hits. 

In Montenegro, or better to say Yugoslavia Montenegro was a part of in 1977, I was influenced by two musical sources - pop music including Meri Cetinic, Novi Fosili, Srebrna Krila, mostly coming from the West of Yugoslavia, and folk music like Hanka Paldum or Ljubomir Djurovic, coming from the country's Eastern parts. After a while the pop sound prevailed and my short-lived love affair with the local folk music ended abruptly and for good. 

In my teens music was my religion again. I was lucky enough to be 13 in 1984, a year that produced probably the largest number of amazing songs well remembered to this day. My tastes were gradually meandering into goth, alternative, electronic, classic rock, jazz. 

In 1990 I joined the Army for one year, performing the then obligatory military service. Music was a part of that year too, though in a weird way. But when my military service was coming to an end, the country was sliding into an ugly, primitive war, and we lost our pace with the modern world. That is also when I lost interest in music for the first time in my life.

It took fifteen years sharp before my innate love for music reawakened. I was in Denmark on a research scholarship in November 2006, and instead of researching day and night, I started discovering popular music on the Internet and got sucked into the whole thing once again. The Killers, John Legend, These New Puritans, James Blunt. Ever since, music has again become one of the most important things in my life. Since March 2008 I have been making monthly charts of the latest songs (something I used to do in my teens) and publishing them on my Facebook page. This blog is aimed at sharing my personal stories about songs from all these different periods of my life, and I hope for no more gaps in my interconnection with music.