Your Life, the soundtrack

[Yerushalmi]

I actually created a playlist for this very purpose some time ago. I hadn't updated it in a while, but I just now added some songs representing the last three years.

Most songs I could only find links to live performances or music videos (official or otherwise). The former won't be quite the exact same version as the one I listen to; the latter, well, just ignore the video, as I'm only here for the music. Some songs mean, to me, things quite different (or even completely opposite!) to what they meant to the songwriters.

Part 1: My childhood
1. "This Town is Wrong", Nerissa & Katryna Nields
2. "Go On", Ookla the Mok
3. "Half Jack", The Dresden Dolls
4. "Torn", Natalie Imbruglia
Part 2: Meeting my Wife, Making Aliya, Discovering Personal Pride
5. "All Because of You", Blackmore's Night
6. "Blastoff Monkey", Ookla the Mok (I couldn't find a link to this one)
7. "You Get What You Give", New Radicals
Part 3: Wedding, Marriage, Lousy Jobs
8. "Winter Wish", Love Hina
9. "I'm Your Moon", Jonathan Coulton
10. "Code Monkey", Jonathan Coulton
Part 4: Birth of My Children, Things Looking Down, Things Looking Up
11. "Shiawase no Iro", Ishida Yoko
12. "Hinageshi no Hana no you ni", Kajiura Yuki
13. "Mou Hitotsu no Happy Ending", Kajiura Yuki
14. "Everything I Need", Melissa Ferrick

Some liner notes

• Based on the fact that no less than four songs have that origin, one might be surprised to discover that I'm not a fan of anime (except Death Note). A year before I got married, a friend who was an obsessive fan of Love Hina sent me about a hundred songs from the series, and I very quickly became enamored with several of them - particularly "Winter Wish", whose lyrics I rewrote in Hebrew to describe how I met and got engaged to my wife, and which I sang to her at our wedding. My wife, too, is a big fan of anime, and I got songs 11-13 from her.
• I was shocked but not surprised at the music video for "You Get What You Give". Typical youth counterculture bulltrout. The song means something very different to me.
• "Torn" was a song that I identified very strongly with a character I played in an online RPG shortly before I met my wife. The song, however, now not only represents that character but by association calls to mind all the characters I played during an aimless period of several years in which I did nothing but play RPGs and had no idea what I was planning on doing with my life.
• "I'm Your Moon" represents my wife's ability to understand me in ways none of my blood relatives ever could - which is, of course, why I married her.
• "Making aliya" means "moving to Israel permanently". So why didn't I say "moving to Israel"? Because I moved to Israel, then met my wife, and only then made aliya, and I want to keep my songs in approximate chronological order.