Seriously, listen to anything except the Top 40 stuff your friends are listening to. I’m not telling you to never listen to it, but you should cultivate a taste for other kinds of music for lots of good reasons you probably wouldn’t think.

My musical taste varied wildly as a teenager. I grew up in the ‘90s, and about halfway through that decade, some of the best music of all time was made. But only for a period of a couple of years, and then music on the radio sucked again. I didn’t know then that there was a such thing as independent music (i.e., music not played on mainstream radio), so I went backwards in time looking for music I liked.

My search led me initially to classic rock, mostly of the Southern rock persuasion, thanks to my childhood and my parents’ tastes. In my early teen years, I discovered jazz thanks to the iconic teenage movie Clueless, in which one of the characters references Billie Holiday. I started listening to her, which led me to Ella Fitzgerald, who in turn led to Louie Armstrong, and on to Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie and through most of the iconic jazz musicians and singers.

At some point in high school, the cool people I had become friends with (thanks to my taste in jazz) introduced me to independent music, like Belle & Sebastian and Braid.

Music might seem like a trivial thing for me to be giving you advice on, but music has been a huge part of my life. It’s soothed me when I was sad, calmed me when I was near the edge, propelled me through long nights of studying as well as countless miles of road, and lifted my spirits when I felt the most alone. Your taste in music is critical to your growth as a person.

Older People Will Respect You

My taste in jazz had an interesting side effect: When adults found out I listened to jazz music voluntarily and that I actually enjoyed it, they looked at me in a different light. Simply by branching out into a different kind of music, it was implied that I wasn’t like other teenagers, that I was somehow more mature. It was as if it hadn’t dawned on them that a teenager could like the same kind of music that they did. They started swapping CDs with me and recommending new artists for me to check out. It was pretty cool to have conversations with people older than me and to feel like I was telling them new things.

You Become More Interesting

Having a varied taste in music gives you a layer of complexity that your friends who only listen to the popular stuff on the radio won’t have. And that complexity makes you more interested to other people. “Oh, you listen to _______? I’ve never heard of them. What are they like?” Knowing about things that other people don’t know about makes you more interesting also.

It Gives You Something in Common With Other Cool, Interesting People

If someone else does listen to the same music you do, it’s like instant friendship. The more esoteric the music, the more instant the friendship. Even being interested in learning more about different kinds of music will draw you into a new circle of friends. The people from my teenage years who were most influential in molding me as a person, were people who either shared a common love of music or introduced me to a new band or type of music.

As an example, one of my fondest is memories is of the first time I heard Chet Baker. I was in a small bookstore when “My Funny Valentine” came on. His voice sliced through the air like a hot knife through butter. I asked the bookstore owner who it was, and we became friends. He guided me to the books who would shape my adventures through my early twenties, and who I am today. By hanging out in the bookstore, I met the people who would become some of my best friends.

It Opens the Doors to Opportunities

When I started listening to jazz, I began to pick out the sounds of the bass and fell in love with it. I quit my guitar lessons, and started bass guitar lessons. The next year I ended up in my high school’s jazz band, playing bass, which might sound dorky but it wasn’t. Playing the bass on stage and jamming out with the other kids on the weekends gave me some serious street cred, and continues to impress even today. I mean, it sounds cool, right? I used to play jazz bass. Cool.

When I got to college, even my limited knowledge of independent music landed me an opportunity that would turn out to shape my entire life’s career. I became a DJ and staff director at my college’s radio station. Thanks to good music, I got to run a radio station, DJ at clubs, and hang out with touring bands all through college. When I graduated, my degree didn’t mean much to employers. My experience at the radio station, however, landed me a job at a magazine, which led me to a job at a newspaper, which led me to marketing and owning my social media business today. Who knew?

So much of life is about who you know, and that ‘whole good music leading to hanging with cool people’ thing will lead you to some pretty cool opportunities.

You Will Be More Creative & Motivated

Good music should inspire you to be better, go faster, dream bigger, keep going, trust yourself, love deeper, be happier. You should be able to put on a pair of headphones, find the right song, and feel whatever you need to feel at that moment. Good music does that. Having that tool can help you get through hard times, train harder physically, concentrate better on studying, and sort through confusing thoughts. Being able to do those things will put light-years ahead of your peers, and heck, most adults too.

Music Gives Your Life a Soundtrack

Here’s another cool thing about getting into cool music as a teenager: you can turn on a song when you’re older, and instantly be transported back to the time period in your life when you were listening to it. Chet Baker takes me back to that bookstore and the days when I was discovering who I was, and Braid takes me back to the cafe I loved where the barista gave me a mixed tape with them on it. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to be able to listen to a song, and remember what I was feeling when I first listened to it. I feel so strongly about creating a soundtrack to your life, I wrote about it here.

Good music gives your life scope and context. I can guarantee your life will be better in ways you never thought. Keep an open mind and listen to some new things. You’ll thank me.

This post is part of a series called Letters to a Teenage Girl. Read the intro and other posts from the series here.

I spent a glorious week in New York City earlier this month. My best friend from college lives in hipper-than-thou Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and I spent a few days with her getting to know that neighborhood and its denizens pretty well. Then I spent a weekend in the middle-of-nowhere Pennsylvania, where my best friend from high school got married. As we toured Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house marveling at the architecture, and biking the Laurel Highlands that surrounds it, I struck up conversations with intellectuals from Japan, Russia, Israel, France, Italy and the UK. When I returned to Brooklyn, I ate up my favorite Middle Eastern delicacies and gobbled up conversations about great works of literature and laughed my ass off as artist-musician-writer types joked satirically about mass American culture. 

All day they’ve been playing Marlon Brando movies. I can’t believe how hot he was. I can’t believe I’ve never noticed him before. It’s not just that he’s attractive – it’s that he’s my ideal. My type to say the least. Hotter even than Paul Newman, because he’s got brown eyes. No, if I’m honest it’s because he looks just like him, like Paul.

Before happening upon “Julius Caesar” as I channel-surfed, it’d been months since I thought of Paul. It’d been ages since I uttered the name of the man I judged all other men against. Until he was there. On the screen, except it was Marlon Brando. Is he objectively my ideal or is it that he’s the spitting image of my first love, my first romantic admiration?

Paul was the embodiment of everything I thought I could ever want in a man. I was 17 maybe, when I first walked into his bookstore. He was so cute that my shy bookworm self could barely lift my eyes to meet his whenever I came in to buy whatever Truman Capote book I hadn’t yet read. I became a regular and he finally drew me out. At some point, I even stopped blushing the entire time I was around him.

He had big warm brown eyes (I’ve been a sucker for them ever since) and short, blond hair that had a bit of a curl, not unlike Brando as Mark Antony. And though he had a small fame, he had an athletic build from years of soccer. He wore V-neck sweaters with a white T-shirt peeking out from underneath, something I’ve also been a sucker for ever since. (For some odd, odd reason every guy I’ve ever dated since has refused to wear a V-neck sweater. I wonder if they knew how much play it would get them, if that would make a difference. But I digress…)

He wrote, on an old Underwood typewriter no less, painted, and played wonderful records. He is responsible for cultivating my love for Chet Baker, jazz, and various indie pop bands. Best of all, he owned a bookstore, his dream… a dream he’s left a six-figure accounting job for in Atlanta. That made him almost untouchable in my 17-year-old lexicon.

When I visited home from college, his shop was one of the first places I went and I was always guaranteed a cup of coffee and great conversation. At some point, I think I was in my junior year, we hooked up. It was like fornicating with a god. Whenever I was between relationships, I knew I could hook up with Paul. Really it only happened a handful of times, but how many people get to do it with someone they idolized? I’m not sure there’s been a more perfect morning in my life than one cool Florida winter morning, air streaming through the window, in Paul’s bed, having coffee. He touched me the way I always wanted to be touched, and saw me the way I’d always wanted to be seen. He had a way of stripping everything away.

I’ve never dated a man who could hold a candle to Paul, and most people would probably say they couldn’t because of the pedestal I placed him on. There’s truth in that, and five or six years later, I can see his faults. He was emotionally unavailable and closed off, unable to commit. And let’s face it: he was willing to sleep with a 20-year-old when he himself was 32.

Still, I’m not so sure that’s all of it. I wonder now, though, whether I more admired him so much as I wanted to be him. I myself was an artist, a book lover, a dreamer, a soccer player, and later, I could find, a writer. I admired the courage it took to leave that kind of security, knowing that he came from the same alcoholic, working class background as I had, to pursue his dream of owning his own business.

I identified with his vivacity and openness in thought. He was so much stronger than me it seemed. He was so confident in who he was, and he seemed genuinely at ease in his solitude. I guess I still do admire Paul, though he’s closed his bookstore and moved on. While I say that I judge all men against him, perhaps it’s really myself that I’m measuring.

I’ve been a bookworm all my life. If you ask my mom, she’ll tell you it’s the result of her reading books to me in utero. My older sister taught me to read when I was 4 years old, and before that I would memorize the books as they were read to me and recite them, pretending to read. My mom and I read Edgar Allen Poe collections every night before bed when I was 8, and my dad got me into Ray Bradbury at the ripe old age of 9. I had a voracious reading appetite. I would read anything I could get my hands on.

I don’t remember any Barnes & Nobles or Borders when I was a kid. Even if they’d been around our town, I don’t think we would have gone there. We grew up pretty poor, and my parents had to be resourceful with what we did have. With a kid who burned through books faster than most kids change television channels, even the used bookstores were pricey.

Enter the public library.

Now, somehow I forgot about the library. I love books, clearly. I love the covers, I love the words, I even love the way used books smell (they’ve got personality; they’ve traveled). My dad used to get mad when I left my books on the ground or got them wet in the bathtub – “You should respect your books, Holly,” he would say.

Once I’ve read a book, I want to hang onto it. It’s part of the family. I lugged my books with me all the way to college, then from Orlando to south Texas, and packed and unpacked them at – count ‘em – yep, six apartments in the past four years. Everything from Jane Austen to existentialist philosophy, Henry VIII biographies to Gabriel Garcia Marquez fill my shelves, my nightstand, the floors. I even love listening to books in the car.

It’s not like times haven’t been tough before. Sure, I could say it’s the rising price of gas or the fear of a soft job economy that led me to think of the public library today. Honestly, I can’t remember how I thought of it. But I called my friend Mel and asked if she was willing to go on a little adventure this afternoon. Off we went to La Retama Central Library.

Thus, I became a card-carrying member of the Corpus Christi public library system today. I checked out two audiobooks and two paperbacks. The Barnes & Noble price would’ve been $67.88 before taxes. My public library price: $0.00. 

Needless to say, I was thrilled walking through the aisles of my new lending library this afternoon. I greeted familiar titles like they were old friends, and felt downright triumphant when I found books I’d wanted to read for ages, but didn’t fit into my budget.

Nothing’s been so easy as getting my library card. I simply filled out a half-page form and showed my ID. It took less than five minutes and I was on my way, clutching my new treasures. I don’t even have to return them to the same library – I can take them to whichever one I want when I’m done. If I need longer at the end of two weeks, I can go online to renew them.

Tough economic times, whether they are caused by a recession or an entry-level salary, can either keep us from continuing our lives, or we can get resourceful, much like my parents did. I have a theory that the most creativity comes when we have limitations or obstacles to overcome. What are your creative solutions to maintaining your simple pleasures? Have you been to your public library lately?