I was riding the MUNI bus during my commute when shuffle mode on my iPhone led me to the World Party song “When You Come Back To Me.”

I could have seen Karl Wallinger, in all his bespectacled glory, perform at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival last weekend. But the cold weather kept me from staying past Gillian Welch’s set to see World Party. I had been surprised to see them on the bill. I didn’t know they were still together.

The first time I heard that song was on the Reality Bites CD soundtrack, one of the first CDs I ever owned. I fell in love with the Lisa Loeb song “Stay” during summer camp in Taiwan and promptly bought the disc afterward at a music store in Taipei.

In Taipei, there was a music video channel that sometimes played American music videos like “Zero,” the first one from the Smashing Pumpkins that made it big. Sometimes they would also play videos from Lenny Kravitz or Aaliyah. But this was Taipei in 1994, not 2009, so for the most part everything was on the radio and on television was in Chinese. And though I didn’t pay much attention to the radio or television in the States, I came to miss having background noise in a language I could understand.

The Reality Bites soundtrack was the one of the few English-language albums I had with me during that sweltering summer. It wasn’t like like the Arrested Development album I had purchased for that hit single “Tennessee” and then set aside. It was an album that I played from beginning to end, day after day, and by the end of that summer I was curious about all of the artists.

This album was how I found out about artists like Juliana Hatfield, The Posies (and by extension, Ken Stringfellow) and Dinosaur Jr. It also had a beautiful extended version of the U2 song “All I Want Is You,” which was the first song I learned to fingerpick. The song “Tempted” by Squeeze played this afternoon when I was in the produce section of Trader Joe’s, reminding me of the World Party song I had heard on the commute in the morning. And since this was the album launched Lisa Loeb’s career, it was also the album that introduced me to the music of IDA and Elizabeth Mitchell, former college roommate and backup singer of Lisa Loeb. IDA is one of my favorite bands.

I bought the Reality Bites VHS tape and then later the DVD. I watched the film so many times that I knew when each musical cue would play, including the tracks that had not been licensed for the final soundtrack. Chinese soap operas were also playing in the house where I grew up, so often that I would unwittingly copy their soundtracks on the piano and add my own melodies and lyrics. But the soundtrack of Reality Bites was what really made me pay attention to way that music and film interrelate.

Many years later, I was working on the label side of music licensing, I found myself reaching to a music supervisor named Karen Rachtman, the woman behind the Reality Bites soundtrack. In an unscripted moment of film music geekery, I wrote her an email, a paean of sorts, professing my enthusiasm for her work and thanking her for the Reality Bites soundtrack.

But I don’t think my message really captured the impact that the soundtrack has had on my life. The album was a patchwork of recordings woven from the fiber of the music that I had not yet realized that I loved. It has, over the years and through both direct and attenuated connections, led me to find the music I love today.