THIS IS A DRAFT, WHICH MAY BE REVISED FROM TIME TO TIME.

I’ve just deployed my own Navidrome music library, and got rid of the restrictions from Apple Music. A big step forward on my way pursuing a perfect music library.

I was about eleven when I began to realise that I should have ‘my own music library’ for the first time, while I didn’t know what to listen then. It was at the dawn before the short-video era. Like most of the people at that time I bagan to know about some pop songs and electronic music via the short videos.

However, I didn’t really understand what kind of music could be considered ‘excellent’. My only standard was ‘fun’. Songs like ‘학교를 안갔어！’ by 량현량하, ‘无敌’ by 邓超, ‘海草舞’ by 萧全, or something like that, were more likely to catch my eyes (Oh shit why did I like them at that time <°O°>). They all sounds silly to me now but also catchy back then, I have to admit.

Thank goodness they were not all I listened to. When I was younger I listened to C-pop songs introduced by my parents, such as ‘后来’ by 刘若英 (I still love it today.), but I didn’t know too many C-pop songs at that age and I thought my taste must be different from my parents, so purposely I looked for English songs rather than Chinese ones. I even didn’t know about 陶喆 until I went to the senior high school.

And here it came: ‘Move your body’ by Sia and remixed by Alan Walker. I don’t remember how I found it, but I didn’t care that anyway: I did like it and played it on my father’s car stereo everyday, which almost drove them mad.

Speaking of Alan Walker, we people living in a small county weren’t really sensitive to a new trend and I’d never heard of Alan Walker before until that night when I hear ‘Faded’ loudly played in a bar opposite to the building where my Uncle’s apartment was. I remembered its melody but unfortunately I didn’t have anything to record and search for it. The bar always played it at midnight and I could’t even wake my uncle and my aunt to borrow their phones to do so.

The turning point was a housewarming banquet. The boy from that family knew me and asked me to go upstairs when the grown-ups were still having the feast in the garden downstairs. He told me he found a ‘really sweet song’. When he pressed the play button on the TV remoye I felt like almost crying.

It was just Faded.

It felt like I got a gift which I’d be longing for years. I screamed and told him that how I looked for it painstakingly those days.

Besides those pop songs I also listened to the soundtracks from some cartoon films, like ‘Telling the World’ by Taio Cruz from Rio and ‘Good to be alive’ by Meghan Trainor from Snoopy: The Peanuts Movie. I created a playlist in the music app in my mother’s streaming account and added all of them into it.

When I was 11, a small thing that made a great difference came to my life. It was an iPod shuffle, given by Aunt Anne, which had ever been a gift she got from her ex when she was a university student.

I’d ever found a MP3 player in my grandmother’s drawner where there were all kinds of old stuff. It was two fingers long and one thumb wide, in a shape of American football, with a mono and rough screen whose pixel was giant. It has a dark red plastic casing and a gray front panel, and the backlight was blue. Even though it looked cheep but for me it was like a treasure.

My precious~ (*Gollum Voice*)

I didn’t tell anybody about that old thing. But soon it was found by Aunt Anne, and she told me it used to belong to my another uncle who’d passed away and it was a keepsack to my grandmother.

Unwillingly I returned that little thing back to her. Perhaps it was to make up for it she gave me the iPod.

It was a pink one, tiny but elegant. Looking closely the reflection on the its brushed metal casing.

Damn, how could it be so … sexy!?

It was a great shock to me