Paws For Thought Invades 2uibestow [Part 1]

This week Jennifer Doherty, the writer of the popular blog 'Paws For Thought' is the guest blogger. I'm really excited about this because I don't know many people more passionate about music than Jennifer.





Guest post 1

When Peter asked me to become a guest blogger, I was honoured but confused. I’m not primarily a music blogger, but my love for it is obvious in many of my posts. I wondered what I would write about, and more importantly, where to begin!
I went to my room yesterday and found that my mum had left a box on my bed. My sister had borrowed it when my eldest nephew was small, and it was filled with children’s cassettes. I realised that this is exactly where my enthusiasm for music began.



I got a fisher price tape recorder for Christmas when I was two years old, and I took it everywhere. I listened to tapes constantly, starting off with nursery rhymes, then tapes teaching counting, the clock and the calendar, to tapes about dinosaurs, to stories, including every Roald Dahl tape available. I got my first walkman years later, and I’m sure the headphones were a welcome feature of it. My family had silence at last!



My dad must have spent a fortune on blank tapes, because I recorded things constantly. My tape recorder was like a camera, and wherever I went, it came too. When I discovered mainstream radio and my sister’s music collection, I began making mixed tapes. Remember when you’d love a new song and be dying to record your own copy. You’d run to the stereo with your finger on the record button, hoping the DJ would play it and praying he wouldn’t talk over the end. I listened to the Hotline with Tony Fenton, Dusty Rhodes and Aidan Leonard on night time 2fm religiously. I wanted to be a DJ, and used to practice with my friends regularly.



My music tastes moved from nursery rhymes to ballads that my dad listened to, to whatever my brother and sister had on, which introduced me to REM and Christy Moore, who I still enjoy listening to today. I liked a lot of what was in the charts when I was seven and eight, but slowly became more aware of my own preferences as well. I didn’t follow the trend of liking what was popular within my circle of friends, and I’m still very different from most of them nowadays when it comes to choosing music. Back then I thought you could only like one band and that was it. I remember loving the Crash Test Dummies for a while, and then realising that I possibly liked Bon Jovi more. I felt like I was betraying the dummies when I bought crossroads, the best of Bon Jovi, but they soon faded away from the music scene anyway, and my obsession with Bon Jovi became almost ridiculous!


Comments

Anonymous said…
I had a Fisher Price tape recorder too!!! A dark brown and tan one when I was three- my most favourite possession ever!

Love this week's feature guys; keep them coming!