Nearly every morning I wake up at the crack of dawn to go to work. I am not a morning person. I trudge along in my morning routine until I get to the car. I plug my phone in and blast a Zelda tune from the speakers, immediately changing the tone of the day. Playing a Zelda song makes everything seem more epic, whether it be another trip to work or running an errand to the grocery store.
Ever since I started playing The Legend of Zelda, its songs have easily influenced my tastes in music. I listen to it daily. I swear its strong melodies are embedded in my DNA at this point, I listen to them that often! I’ve been listening to Zelda music since I was about 11, though I didn’t always have as easy access to it. I used to carry around a tape recorder and listen to bits and pieces that I recorded from Ocarina of Time like the “Lost Woods,” “Zelda’s Lullaby,” or the “Lon Lon Ranch Theme.”
My mother then decided I could borrow some of her blank CDs so I could use an actual CD player to listen to my music instead of the sad little tape recorder, and thus my CD burning days began. I made several CDs filled with Zelda music, and I listened to them all the time. In the car, I would beg my mom to let me listen to them for the length of the ride, and she would usually let me — she actually began to like the music as well, even though she’s not a gamer by any means.
These songs always made everyday life seem more like an adventure. I would put on tracks like “The Great Sea” from The Wind Waker and immediately it made traveling less tedious. Since I didn’t have to keep my eyes on the road at the time, I could let my imagination run wild and pretend I was out on a quest for the Triforce.
One day while in the parking lot of a grocery store with a friend, I tried to explain this feeling to her. The song in particular that came on the radio was the “Hyrule Field Theme” from Twilight Princess. I was still young and was not the best at articulating my thoughts (to this day I’m still a much better writer than a speaker). While it might not have been word-for-word, I said something along the lines of “This song makes going to the grocery store a lot more epic!” The keywords of that sentence were “grocery store,” because that was the only part she took away from it. She then dubbed the “Hyrule Field Theme” “The Grocery Store Song.”
Years later when I got my own car, I kept onto those CDs. My old clunker only had a CD player, thus it was all I had to listen to. I popped in that CD and turned the dial to “The Grocery Store Song,” as I also call it myself from time to time. I would pop it in when I specifically was going to the store on errands. It was a new experience for me to go shopping on my own, and having a soundtrack as grand as Twilight Princess’s in the background made it all the more exciting.
Nowadays, I’m used to shopping on my own. As of right now, I’ve been out on my own for about a year, but I still turn on that song whenever I need my mundane routines to feel a little more legendary.
