User:Juand.1974

Hey, how are you doing? My name's Juan and I'm a 20 year old, seventh semester history student. For one of my classes, called Digital Humanities, I had to make edit a Wikipedia article for an assignment. Otherwise, I never would've learned that doing so could be so accessible and simple. Since then I've been hooked, editing and collaborating on articles of my interests. These are mostly music related, as I'm what you can call a "melomaniac". My edits have been centered on album articles, from ABBA and Fleetwood Mac specially, although I hope to be able to contribute to many others, not necessarily all music related, based on the skills I learn from University and the ones I'll develop as a historian.

I'm still new and still learning, but I find editing articles to be a very fun hobby and consider it therapeutic and very satisfying.

About me

My name's Juan David. I was born in Bogotá, Colombia, on July 19, 2004. It's where I've lived most of my life. On two separate occasions, because of my father's job, I lived in the U.S. The first time, when I was around 8, in Columbus, Georgia, and the second one, when I was around 14, in McLean, Virginia, where I was able to experience both middle and high school. We came back in 2019 and I ended up graduating high school on June 2021. I entered college not short after, the month after graduation, to pursue a degree in History (the first day of classes happened to coincide with my birthday). Although I'd like to say that I always knew History was what I wanted to study, I wasn't truthfully sure when choosing at the time and was scared of regretting it or not being able to find my passion. Now however, I can say that it was the right choice and that I couldn't see myself majoring in anything else (part of the reason why I seem to forget how unsure I was when I was younger). I live with my mother and have a pet cat that I adore. I love history, music, sitcoms and action shows, cleaning and organizing, and, now, editing Wiki articles.

I started university on July 2021. The first day of classes also happened to be my birthday, so I technically was 16 when I started. First semester proved to be a rough one for me, due to many different personal problems that grouped themselves and intensified with the fact that classes were online. Each semester after that got better, and they've kept being great. I've learned, grown and challenged myself a lot.

Music

Music is one of the most important aspects of my life. It is with me daily, from the moment I wake up till the moment I go to bed. It wasn't always this way thought. I'd say I found my passion in music because of my first semester of college. It was a very rough time for me, socially and personally, and music proved to be a coping mechanism that helped me get through it and do better. It saved me, like it has done many other times.

Looking back, until then (second half of 2021), music had never been an important part of my life. I remember periods of time when I perhaps would listen to a song once in a while, or watch a music video of a catchy song here and there. During 5th or 6th grade, I vaguely remember having a playlist. Listening to it wouldn't be very frequently. But I always seemed to have an affinity for old music. Whether it was because of what my mother and uncle would sometimes play when I was growing up, just a random innate attraction for it, some other reason I'm not aware of, or a combination of these or more factors, I can't say. But, no matter what, older music always spoke to me.

My love for it really only started in the last months of 11th grade (our senior year here in Colombia). For some odd reason I had "Mamma Mia" by ABBA stuck to my head. I distinctly remember watching the song's music video on YouTube (that's the main and only way I consumed music back then, if ever) and clicking on the one for "Waterloo" on the recommended, out of curiosity. That's the official moment, in my own personal canon, that the passion and craze began. From what I remember, it got stuck to my head and I kept re-watching it. That led me to listen to more of their other hits (I already knew songs like "Dancing Queen" and "Chiquitita", of course) and I slowly became obsessed. I don't seem to be about moderation or happy mediums and I went from someone who could care less about listening to music and wondering how people could say they couldn't live without it, to someone completely immersed in it.

A cure I found to the isolation I felt and put myself in during that first semester was music. It was the period of time where I really got into it. ABBA was jam (still is) but I was OBSESSED. During a period of around a year I listened to their whole discography, listened to them nonstop and learned the lyrics to all their songs. I read about them a lot too. This process would also later include Frida and Agnetha's english solo work, which saw the same amount of obsession and time. I created a Spotify account, app that since then I've used daily and my main playlist was, of course, an ABBA one, which at the time didn't let me have a way to listen to other artists. During this time, however, I remember listening to ones like Cyndi Lauper and Stevie Wonder, which I had no real way of listening to consistently, which I didn't really care for at the time.

My ABBA only era lasted until 2023. The start of the year saw me get into the Bee Gees, since I considered them a related group to ABBA and figured I'd like them. I did. The problem was that I kept using the same obsessive methodology, and didn't have any mixed or big playlists. All of them were divided into artists and included the songs and albums I considered finished with (this consisted of a process of listening to an album a good number of times, until I felt familiar enough with its songs and style, rather than being completely done with them, as it could suggest). Since then on, I've gone through many phases, or as I call and group specific content consumption of a specific period of time, which do not entail neither a linear evolution or the forgetting and discardment of previous one. It is more of a cumulative effort, in which any "old songs" (the one that I listened to and focused on longer ago) ferment and age; the appreciation for them keeps growing.

Around February of the same year (my Bee Gee's phase happened to coincide with my driving course, around January), I decided to create a comprehensive playlist and add any and all 70's or 80's songs I already heard before or liked. I was very selective and didn't care much for the 60's or 90's at the time (and much less about any song past the 2000's). I called it Das Musikal, themed around marxist imagery, with a description that read "Artists of the world unite", a clear parody. It remains my pride and joy and is the one I mostly use today, featuring more than 2100 songs, as of writing. Along with the playlist, I decided to create a list on my Notes app. It would first just consist of any artist that I would like to explore more, only 10-15. Now, it contains over 300 artists and includes many other categories. It's not very organized, to say the least, and definitely requires some filtering, by year, decade, region, etc. The creation of the playlist and list is, what I consider, the start of my melomaniac journey, marking a shift from exploring certain artists obsessively, to wanting to explore many more, from a varied range of genres and places. I've had many phases since then, and connected with some in a really special way, distinct from the rest.

Special artists

Among all the artists I've explored (with thousands more yet to be listened to) my favorites, based on what they mean to me and to my life at a particular time, are in no particular order:

• ABBA
• Bee Gees
• Andy Gibb
• Fleetwood Mac
• Agnetha Fältskog
• Frida
• Journey
• TOTO
• Air Supply
• Olivia Newton-John
• ELO
• Cyndi Lauper
• Stevie Wonder
• Donna Summer
• Roxette
• Cher
• Foreigner
• Starship
• Blondie
• Boney M.
• The Police
• Pink Floyd

"Completed" albums

List of albums I can say I've really listened to. Completed in the sense that I listened to them enough times to get to know their songs (not a specific amount) and feel familiar enough with them to consider them "done".