Growing up, I was surrounded by classical music. Both my folks loved the great composers. Beethoven was their favorite. Bach, not so much (I had to discover his genius on my own). And while there were exceptions (Streisand and Herb Alpert immediately come to mind as being heard during my childhood), classical was by and large my gateway to the world of music. It probably also explains my love of movie soundtracks since the vast majority of them are orchestral in nature.
To my parents' horror, I discovered rock in high school. I blame most of it on my buddy across the cul-de-sac from us, who not only turned me on to hi-fi equipment but a lot of awesome music as well. His collection spanned everything from Chicago to Deep Purple, and while I didn't like all of it, I did latch on to many bands that remain favorites to this day.
I'm of the belief that the music you come to love in your 20s is the music that will resonate the most with you as you go through the rest of your life. With me—coming out and clubbing—it was disco and all the myriad mutations that came after. It's what still comprises the vast majority of my vinyl collection, and it seems each song has a special memory attached to it.
It wasn't until I hit my 40s that I discovered jazz via the wife of one of my employers. The gateway drug was Michael Feinstein, which in turn led me to seek out the "original" versions of the songs he sang. This lead me to Ella, Billie, Sarah, and countless others. I embraced it with a fervor matched only by my love of disco and dance music. It was augmented during our time in Denver with discoveries I made via KUVO.
I've always been a fan of electronic music, a genre that tends to cross over all others (rock, jazz, dance, and even classical—thank you, Wendy Carlos and Isao Tomita). Jean-Michel Jarre to this day gives me chills.
While not strictly electronic in nature, it was a few years ago that I started getting into what I guess could loosely be called "Ambient" and "Chill House". (Y'know, those ridiculously priced CDs that often have "Ibiza" in their names. ) Anyhow, as I've written before, one of my favorites in the Ambient genre has been Loscil, but there's also Biosphere, Weatherman and many others.
Very recently I discovered (via My Husband and I) the group Deep Dive Corp and I'm really grooving on them at the moment. It's the type of music I put on when I want to write or be productive. It definitely gets in my head in that regard.
So while I superficially identify with Sarah's comic above, I guess it's not really true at all. Even after all these years, I'm still discovering new music that can play me in so many different ways.