I would say music formed my life [...]

Katlaughing --

Yes, that is what I was thinking, almost immediately after starting dthis thread. My mother was, I'm sorry to say (as much as I loved her), a bit tone deaf... I remember being three years old and wincing whenever she tried to sing me a song, complaining of "wrong notes."

However, both she and my father had a wide taste in music, and a wide collection of albums, and I can't remember a day of my life when there wasn't some music in the air.

All of that music shaped who I am today, and if any one piece of that music wasn't there, I might have turned out very differently, as a person. And so maybe every song changed my life. But it's a bit like a celtic knot of entwining vines -- very hard to trace any particular fruit back to a specific root.

However, I do credit Gordon Bok's cover of "A Sailor's Prayer" with getting me through the darkest days of my mother's cancer while I was away at grad school. Because that song was in my life, I can't say where I'd have been (or not been) had it been absent.