I celebrated another orbit around the sun recently and listened to a lot of music. For once, the YouTube algorithm did its job and suggested a lot of songs I hadn’t heard in years. It was wonderfully nostalgic and made me think about the role music has played in my life.

I’ve always had a deep appreciation for music. When I was little, my parents would play classical music to me. The Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss II was probably the musical piece I listened to most as a child. I remember it being the first track on a mixtape my parents made for me.

At around age five or six, I received a radio for my birthday. That was the beginning of my own self-directed journey into the musical world. The radio was permanently tuned to Jacaranda FM — a regional station that played golden hits from the ’60s through the ’90s. A little later, around age eight or nine (in the mid-’90s), I had a friend with a Walkman and a greatest hits compilation CD of Queen. That, plus hearing Queen on the radio, sparked my fascination with the band — my first favorite band! I was devastated when I found out that Freddie Mercury had passed away a couple of years prior.

By the time I was eleven or twelve (in the late ’90s), I discovered TuksFM — the official campus radio station of the University of Pretoria. TuksFM was absolutely iconic in the ’90s and 2000s. It gave me and countless others an education in what good music should sound like. They played mostly alternative rock, punk, and indie music, with metal, electronic and ‘eclectic’ music also thrown in for good measure. I still have fond memories of listening to them and sending in my own song requests via text message in the early hours of the morning. My car radio was permanently dialed in to TuksFM. Sadly, TuksFM has since changed direction and no longer plays the awesome music they used to. But through friends, social media, and the like, I continue to find amazing music every now and then.

I created a playlist on my YouTube channel to capture (at least just a little of) what it was like to listen to TuksFM back in the day. You can check it out here (Playlist title: TuksFM Nostalgia).

I love how we collect songs and bands along the way — like picking gems glimmering out of the walls of a dark cave we’ve been exploring our whole lives. As we go through life, we find music that resonates with us at a particular moment in time and (if we remember to save it) keep it treasured somewhere in a playlist. Even if we forget about it, the moment we hear the song again, it brings back a flood of emotions and memories (ranging from pleasant and euphoric to bitter-sweet and heart breaking). That nostalgic value that music carries is so precious to me. Music can say things that words alone simply cannot.

This reminds me of a quote from a video essay I watched a while back about the song Master and a Hound by Gregory Alan Isakov:

“Life looks a lot like a continuous search for something we’ll probably never find… But I’m grateful for music like Gregory Alan Isakov’s that keeps us company along the way.”

I would say that music — and art in general, even — keeps us company along the way; it helps us find meaning, or at least solace, in our daily lives.

I listen to a wide variety of music — a little of everything. When people ask me for recommendations, I always struggle and feel like I’m making a fool of myself, because I get overwhelmed by all the possible songs I could recommend and I just can’t really do it justice. I think the music you enjoy at any given moment has a lot to do with your emotional state, your current life situation, and so on.

That being said, I’ve created a little playlist of music I’ve been listening to recently. It’s by no means an exhaustive list of all my favorite bands and songs — just what resonates with me at the moment. You can find the playlist on my YouTube channel here (Playlist title: Some Good Music Nov 2025).

I think I’ll make a separate post later about the music I listen to while I write. I tend to listen mostly to instrumental music when I’m writing, and I like to use it to get into the right state of mind for the particular story I’m working on. But more on that in a later post.

Anyway, that’s about all I wanted to say. Let me know if you enjoyed the playlist — and, by all means, if you think I’m missing out on a band or a particular song that fits the same vibe, please don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments.

Happy listening. Chat soon.
MK.