Soundtrack To My Life - Maria

It's a pleasure to host the Soundtrack To My Life of Maria.  She is a Spaniard married to an Englishman and raises a bilingual and bicultural child - something that always fascinates me as my grandfather was German.  She is also a professional translator and shares my love for MiaTui handbags!  For now, over to Maria...

¨¨°º©©º°¨¨

The Dying Swan 

Not a song per se. I was a ballet girl growing up, I started at three after my grandma saw my reaction when I saw some ballet on the TV, she told my mother I was going to ballet classes even if she had to pay for it. I loved every minute of it.

My parents made me try other sports: sailing, tennis, horse-riding. I always wanted to go back to ballet, my legs even cleverly developed a rash in the winter Atlantic Ocean water so that I didn't have to go to sailing classes on a Saturday morning when I'd rather be doing a 4 hour ballet class (well, we did Spanish dance (zarzuela, flamenco, pasodoble and my regional Galician dance, muiñeira, too). The rash on my legs was totally gone by the time the good summer weather started and we could start going to the beach again, of course! I did grow up by the Atlantic Ocean you see.

Every year in June we would put on a couple of shows (you wouldn't believe the amount of costumes that still exist from them), the big number was the death of the swan, always danced by the same girl, I wanted to be her, I wanted to be the dying swan but would have settled for the Pas de quatre. Of course, it never happened.

Who knew genetics would kick in with such a vengeance. By age 14 I didn't enjoy ballet as much anymore, I didn't have a ballerina figure, I was slim but had marked curves which included rather a lot of boobage. By then the shows stressed me out and I knew I wanted to be a translator, I was definitely no swan.

Los Secretos - Déjame 

Once ballet was out of the way it was time to be a teenager and this was my favourite song to dance to every Saturday.

I think the lyrics are rather self-explanatory: "Leave me, don't play with me anymore, this time I'm serious, you had your chance and you let it go, leave me, don't come back to me, once I was wrong but now all of that has passed and there's nothing left of that love. There's nothing you can do now, because to your side I won't go back."

Feisty? me? Never!!!

Goria Gaynor - I Will Survive 

You can see how this is going, right??

Remember when The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert came out? What do you mean you have never watched this fantastic film? You must! At once! Anyway, it was 1994, so perhaps 1995 by the time I watched it in Spain, although I've just had the feeling I may have watched it in Paris during my year there. Anyway, this song was on it, the movie was so fantastic, I never forgot either. With the years this became the soundtrack to my life, above all in my thirties when twat after twat came and went. No fairy tale told me I had to kiss so many frogs to find the one that wasn't a toad!

I requested (*ahem* ordered) the DJ in our song list to play it at our wedding dance because to me it marked the end of all those failed relationships, of all the heartache, it was one final swear word to the past. I love dancing to it, when the song started playing I was talking to a friend of my husband's who I had never actually met, I quickly uttered my apologies and ran to the dance floor holding my dress up so not to trip (well, that wouldn't have been very ladylike, would it?)

Brandi Carlile - The Story

This song played in an episode of Grey's Anatomy years ago and I fell in love with it straight away, I googled it and I bought it. I never ever pay for anything on iTunes, this is how much I liked it.

Why? That's such a long story. It's a song that describes me, my life in my thirties, my life in general ever since I had a huge accident when I was about to turn 18. You can read the full story on my blog.

Michael Bublé - Sway 

Any version of Sway really but it was Michael Buble's that I used to dance to around the kitchen when I was pregnant. Shortly after she was born, LittleT went through an unsettled period, either me or Mr Tapas (who knows, it's all a blur) remembered some advice about music that the baby hears while in the womb and how it may soothe them when they are born. So I started to dance around the kitchen with my newborn baby while holding her tight with her ear close to my heart, it worked every time. In fact, I used to have the remote control in my hand to make sure I could replay it if necessary.

A few days later she had a whole playlist just for her, of all the songs that would soothe her.

It's funny because I didn't manage to convince my husband to dance to Sway for the first dance at our wedding and yet I spent months dancing to it one year later.

¨¨°º©©º°¨¨

Maria finishes with "That's it from me, so many other songs have popped into my mind but these are "the five". I hope you like my musical story?"  You can find Maria blogging over at Feisty Tapas and you can follow her on Facebook and Twitter. 

If you want to join in with Soundtrack To My Life you can complete this form and I'll be in touch when your feature is due to go live.  Click on the mix-tape to the right to read all the "Soundtrack To My Life" entries.