This week's Music Memory comes from Sara Turman of St. Louis Park, Minn.:

I was 15, and one of my good friends had just got her driver's license. We lived in a small town in Wisconsin, and we were constantly inundated by the late '80s Top 40 hair bands on the only radio station in town.

My friend happened to have a boyfriend who happened to know other people who had access to interesting music, and she had a mix tape from him. She popped it in the tape deck as we drove down the curvy country road, and I had never heard anything like that before. Boom. Life changing. Nirvana.

There was no turning back at that point — grungy coffee houses, baby-doll dresses with big boots, poetry, dreamy Mr. Sensitive Ponytail Man, and angst angst angst here I come!

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