The Tubes "What Do You Want From Life?"

We were like twins, born 8 years apart.

My college girlfriend had an older sister who was married.  And her husband and I had this weirdly parallel existence.

Which was cool for me, because I got to see what life would be like for me in a few years.

He was in TV production, and I was just graduating college ready to start making videos.  He took me to a studio where he worked, and showed me what was cutting edge technology, never before seen by me---computer animation.  I got career advice and encouragement, with a healthy dose of reality (finding work is hard), doled out by someone who'd moved through life with a temperament and style similar to mine.

I also got to see what life was like, in the past.  Sort of.

Because he was 8 years older than me, he grew up with music that had come and gone before my musical awakening.  Sure, I hadn't missed out on The Beatles and The Stones---I could go back to bands like that---but what about the nooks and crannies of 70s weirdness that had already slipped into obscurity by the mid-1980s?

He was a prolific cassette-tape-maker, and though I'd made mix tapes before, I really upped my game, after seeing the care that he put into both the track listing, and the package design.

Mix tapes are a hazy memory in this (digital age) day and age, as is that girlfriend.  But I heard this Tubes track the other day, and knew that if I had taken a different (dating) path, "What Do You Want From Life" (which I first heard on one of his awesome mix tapes) probably wouldn't have registered in my mind at all. 

But instead, it invokes the warm analog nostalgia of cassette-tapes and video production and college girlfriends' families and musical friendships made and faded.


Hear the song on Youtube.