What’s a song that changed your life?

Three Chords and a Bad Attitude

There are songs that supposedly change your life.

Songs people hear at sixteen while staring out a rain-streaked window and suddenly decide to become a poet, move to Paris, overthrow capitalism, marry the wrong person, or buy an acoustic guitar they’ll eventually abandon in a closet.

Mine was a little less dignified.

The Ramones.

“I Wanna Be Sedated.”

Did it change my life?

Maybe not.

But it sure as hell set the tone.

That song came at you like a stolen car with bad brakes. Fast, stupid, brilliant, loud, and completely uninterested in asking permission.

No grand guitar solo.

No ten-minute meditation on the human condition.

Just a relentless wall of sound and the unmistakable feeling that civilization had become mildly unbearable.

That spoke to me.

It was funny.

It was rebellious.

It was exhausted.

It was impatient.

It was basically saying, “I have had enough of this horseshit. Somebody please turn the volume down on reality.”

And somewhere in there, a door opened.

Punk.

Not just the music.

The whole damn attitude.

The idea that you didn’t need permission.

You didn’t need perfect equipment.

You didn’t need expensive clothes.

You didn’t need to play like some conservatory-trained wizard. You just needed something to say and enough nerve to say it loudly. That philosophy stuck. Probably more than I realized.

Punk led to other bands. Other scenes. Other weird people. Dark clubs. Questionable venues.

Kids in ripped jackets, bad haircuts, combat boots, safety pins, cigarettes, bruised knuckles, and more opinions than good sense.

Beautiful people, really.

The outsiders.

The ones who didn’t fit neatly into the approved machinery.

And I understood them.

Maybe because I never had much interest in fitting neatly into anything either.

That attitude followed me into adulthood.

Photography became a little punk.

Writing became a little punk.

Even the way I travel has some of it.

Take the backroad.

Ignore the obvious destination.

Photograph the weird thing.

Talk to the stranger.

Walk into the strange building.

Ask the uncomfortable question.

If everyone’s looking one direction, turn around and see what the hell they’re missing.

That’s punk.

At least to me.

Not the leather jacket.

Not the haircut.

Not the patches.

The refusal to let somebody else decide what your life is supposed to look like.

And maybe that’s why “I Wanna Be Sedated” still makes sense after all these years.

Because adulthood, it turns out, is basically an endless series of reasons to want sedation.

Bills. Meetings. Politics. Emails. Work schedules. Family drama. Social media. News cycles. Password resets.

People hitting reply-all when there is absolutely no reason on God’s green earth to reply-all.

Some days, Joey Ramone sounds less like a punk singer and more like a prophet.

But the song also reminds me where a lot of this started.

The curiosity.

The weirdness.

The willingness to wander into places respectable people probably avoided.

The urge to document the strange corners of life instead of pretending everything is clean and orderly.

So no.

I don’t know if “I Wanna Be Sedated” changed my life.

That gives one song too much credit.

Life is rarely changed by one clean, cinematic moment.

Usually it’s thousands of small things piling up until one day you look around and realize you became somebody.

But that song was definitely one of the early warning signs.

A gateway drug to punk rock.

A three-chord invitation into a louder, stranger world.

And apparently, I accepted.

Because forty-some years into this bizarre carnival ride, I’m still walking around with cameras, notebooks, questionable ideas, a stubborn dislike of conformity, and an unhealthy curiosity about whatever’s hiding down the next road.

So maybe the Ramones didn’t change my life.

Maybe they just handed me the soundtrack.

And I took it from there.

Hey, ho.

Let’s go.