Tyler

I wasn’t home the night that Tyler first came to our house. When he landed in Newark Airport from Shanghai International, I was at Z100’s Jingle Ball, a hysterical, retroactively cringey rite of passage for tween girls from the tri-state suburban area. I couldn’t tell you who played that night (or maybe I’m just too embarrassed to), but it doesn’t matter. I was immersed in a blinding, deafening, musical pandemonium while my brother walked through our door for the first time, sat down at our breakfast table for the first time, met our mom for the first time.

Music wasn’t really passed down in my family. My dad only ever referenced Abbey Road, and I was vaguely aware that my mom liked Simon & Garfunkel-era folk music. When my mom and I first moved to New Jersey, the only CD we owned, some generic Christmas album, played perpetually in our station wagon. I consumed the music most available to me—the songs my friends sang as we skipped rope at recess, the same three songs on rotation on top 40 radio stations, the songs spotlighted on TV soundtracks and shows like Glee. It wasn’t until the second half of middle school that I realized I could be an active participant in listening to music. Then, I spent hours cycling through videos on Youtube, slipping into any universe offered to me, no matter how briefly (looking at you, world of white rappers).

So I was maybe unfoundedly confident that Tyler would share this sentiment. An eleven year age gap, aggressively different backgrounds, and a significant language barrier didn’t present much of a problem in my mind (my broader misconception that I could interact with my adopted three-year-old brother the same way I interacted with a grown person didn’t help). The universality of music was a simple truth to me. Yeah, I hoped Tyler would like my music, but I just wanted him to like music at all. So one day, after serious deliberation about the song selection, when Tyler was up to his chest in fizzling bath bubbles, I played Michael Giacchino’s “The Ellie Badge” from the Up soundtrack. For a brief second, panic washed over me, an augmented version of the panic induced anytime you’re showing a new person a song that you realize you might have over-hyped. But he loved it. And my mom and I, anxious to unabashedly express the sense of family we felt and wanted Tyler to feel, released a floodgate of music with him and each other like we hadn’t before. Some things went over better than others: Tyler had no interest in The Strokes, but requested The Beatles’ “Carry That Weight” on repeat for two months. Coldplay and Red Hot Chili Peppers were added to the list, whereas I never was able to get him interested in the Talking Heads. He showed a penchant for classical music that my mom shared, and suddenly classical tracks played on the way to school or Costco. Now my mom and I were sharing music with each other, too. Car rides would include bickering over the playlist, debates would be had over the merit of listening to “Gangnam Style” for the tenth time in two hours, and we would always circle back to “Carry That Weight.”

A giddy pride washes over me every time I talk about Tyler’s music taste, even though his archive of beloved songs includes one called “Everybody Poops.” Five years later, there’s no doubt that Tyler and I have distinctly different music tastes, but it doesn’t matter. Family, kinship, and love aren’t found through liking the same song or band, no matter what that rom-com trope tells you. Relationships arise in the sharing process, in the mutual desire to understand what it is about a particular arrangement of sounds that makes the other smile. That a bizarre song about pooping makes my brother smile, makes him hum the melody, makes him show it to me to try to get me to love it as well, is family.