Music is my life. As cliché as that sounds, it is genuinely the only thing that gets me through the day. From the moment I wake up to the minute I go to sleep, I’ll have my AirPods in or vinyls spinning on my record player. My roommate walks through the door to find me playing any number of artists, from Carole King on my tinny phone speakers on early, sunny mornings to my unreleased “Nostalgia, Ultra” vinyl when getting ready to go out. 

I live and breathe music. It is the one thing I can’t live without; I’d rather lose every single other one of my five senses than lose my hearing. I’d rather never taste another pile of In-N-Out Animal Style fries, never watch another Sofia Coppola movie, never touch another wool sweater or never smell another California sagebrush on my morning walks than never hear another piece of music again. When I have my headphones on or feel the beat move through me at the club or at a concert, I feel truly alive. 

When I first arrived at USC, I had quite a difficult freshman year, although I hadn’t recognized it at the time. It took my therapist pointing it out for me to understand what had been happening. In that freshman year, I had a playlist of every song released by my favorite band at the time, Car Seat Headrest. The caption to the playlist is “csh got me through a bad time in my life by making it worse.” That much, to say the least, was true. 

This confusing mess of emotions and worries and anxieties followed me into sophomore year, but working through it with my therapist and pushing myself every day to practice resilience helped. Each day was better than the last. Then, the summer before I was due to leave for my year abroad in Scotland, I could finally feel that I was getting happier and more content with my life. 

In my beautiful, sun-drenched bedroom at home in the best city in the world, San Pedro, California, listening to the sound of peacocks cawing and seals yelping outside my window, with green leaves trailing dotted shadows on the floor and the smell of ocean-sweet salt in the air, I had my beat-up old copy of Bruce Springsteen’s “Born In The U.S.A.” spinning on my record player and echoing throughout the house. 

In that moment, as I was dancing around my room and putting clothes on hangers while Springsteen belted out, “There’s something happening somewhere / Baby, I just know that there is,” I felt true joy. 

I had my whole life ahead of me. I was so happy to just be there in that moment, looking toward a future where I had a million more moments exactly like that ahead of me.

Those moments continued in the United Kingdom. Although I had to leave my record player behind, I traded it for countless nights in Scotland in cramped, dark, smoke-filled rooms, dancing the night away to UK garage tracks with the best friends in the whole world beside me. 

My life in Scotland was soundtracked by Interplanetary Criminal and 4am Kru, but also The Smiths, The Stone Roses and The 1975. On the days that I was missing home, I’d walk down the cobblestone streets and stare up at the castle looming over me while Joni Mitchell sang “Oh, California, I’m coming home / Oh, make me feel good rock ‘n roll band / I’m your biggest fan / California, I’m coming home.” And yet, I was elated to be abroad, to be experiencing the exhilarating randomness of life over 5,000 miles away from everything I’d ever known. 

A watershed moment for me occurred on the banks of one of the many canals in Venice, Italy. I had gone over a weeklong break in February with my brother. As I talked about in my column at the time, we spent the week wandering the endless alleys and visiting every museum and church we could. But, on the last day, after I had seen my brother off at the train station, I returned to my favorite little cafe on the backside of the Rialto Bridge. 

There, sitting on a wooden folding chair with an Aperol spritz and the customary potato chips, I listened to the delicate, nostalgic strains of Simon & Garfunkel’s “America.” It didn’t matter that I wasn’t even in America at the time — the only thing that mattered was the all-consuming contentment that settled in my bones as I watched the gondolas bump against the brick walkway. The houses across the canal seemed to shine in the noonday sun and the water was the most brilliant shade of blue I had ever seen in my life. 

A nice Italian couple bought me another drink, and I sat there slightly tipsy and entirely at peace with the world. It is one of the happiest memories of my life, and as I listen to “America” as I write these lines, I am immediately flashed back to that sense of wholeness that burned itself into my memory. 

“They’ve all come to look for America.” To me, these lyrics encapsulate the terrifying yet unutterably beautiful sentiment of looking for life. Music not only helps me look for my life — it is my life.

“Jam Journal” is a rotating column featuring a new Daily Trojan editor in each installment commenting on the music most important to them. Hannah Contreras is an arts & entertainment editor at the Daily Trojan.