Marked by Music — Episode 3: Modern Love

What if one song could take you back to the year you discovered you could be someone different?

In this episode of Marked by Music, Sara Driver revisits 1983–84, when she left Topeka, Kansas, to spend her sophomore year living with a family in Monterrey, Mexico. Suddenly, the shy, nerdy violin girl found herself surrounded by new siblings, new friends, teenage parties, and a freedom she had never experienced before.

With David Bowie's “Modern Love” as the soundtrack, Sara shares a deeply personal story about belonging, reinvention, teenage rebellion, and the complicated ways we learn to escape the pressures of our lives. It's a story filled with laughter, Bacardi and Diet Coke, Marlboro Reds, Halls cough drops, and the unforgettable feeling of finally fitting in.

But freedom sometimes comes with a cost.

More than four decades later, one song still brings it all rushing back—the joy, the friendships, the mistakes, and the fifteen-year-old girl who finally got to breathe.

Because music doesn't just remind us of our past. It holds the people we used to be.

🎻 Marked by Music — Every life has a soundtrack. What's yours?

What happens when a twelve-year-old falls in love with Donna Summer’s Bad Girls—without realizing what the song is actually about?

In this episode of Marked by Music, Sara remembers begging her parents for the album, playing it at full volume, and singing about the streetwalkers of Sunset Boulevard with complete enthusiasm and total innocence. The irony? Welcome Back, Kotter was considered too controversial in her house.

Bad Girls became Sara’s first non-classical album and opened the door to an entirely new musical world. Soon she was recording songs from Casey Kasem’s countdown onto cassette, falling in love with everything from Fleetwood Mac and Blondie to Kenny Rogers, Bette Midler, and the television show Fame.

She also revisits Barry Manilow’s “Copacabana”—a miniature musical filled with glamour, romance, murder, and heartbreak—which she performed both for audiences and alone around the house.

Warm, funny, and personal, this episode explores how popular music didn’t replace Sara’s classical world—it made her world bigger. These songs gave a twelve-year-old permission to imagine a life filled with art, drama, performance, and possibility.

The summer of 1989 still lives in my head like a mixtape.

Certain songs can take me right back—to the heat, the people, the places, the version of me I was then, and all the things I thought were still ahead of me. It was one of those summers that somehow became bigger in memory, stitched together by music and moments I didn’t know I would still be carrying decades later.

In this episode of Marked By Music, I go back to that summer and the soundtrack that held it all.

Because sometimes a song doesn’t just remind you of where you were.

It reminds you of who you were.