I’m working on a story about “anti-love” songs for Valentine’s Day, and it has gotten me thinking about music in a more philosophical manner than I usually do. Given that I think about music for a living, oftentimes quite philosophically, this is definitely a feat.

An old college friend of mine, who works at a small newspaper in northern New Hampshire, is also working on his own anti-love song story. Some history on this — this is an idea that we came up with together while working for the student newspaper at Keene State College in Keene, N.H. I wrote the initial story for that paper, a list of our picks for the 14 best anti-love songs with some description for each.

Anyway, as this has been a developing idea for both of us for quite some time, we’ve naturally been discussing our progress with each other and our thoughts on music in general. Yesterday, we were having one such conversation, and one of us (I don’t remember who) brought up an interesting question: What does the music you listen to say about your personality? More specifically, what does your favorite band say about you?

After examining this a bit further, my friend and I discovered that each of our favorite bands actually does match up with our respective personalities. For example, my favorite band is, was and most likely always will be Nirvana. On a surface level, this makes sense — I can be an extremely angry person, and Nirvana was an extremely angry-sounding band.

But going deeper than this, when you examine Nirvana’s songs, nearly all of them had an underlying hook or structure that was pure pop. This conflict between mainstream sensibilities and punk rock rebellion has also been an underlying concern in my own life — not only as a musician, but as a person. I’m rebellious, but I’m also tempered by an understanding that things are a bit more complicated than the punk rock “us versus them” mentality. My friend suggested that I have pop sensibilities that are in direct conflict with my desire to remain an outsider, and I find this accurate.

My friend’s favorite band is The Beatles. The Beatles were trend-setters, always on the cutting edge, always forward thinking and moreover, probably the most eclectic rock band to exist. My friend is also a fairly well-rounded, forward-thinking person. This theory was making more and more sense as we went along.

We then decided to look at our favorite films (my friend is a movie critic). In both our cases, it’s the 2001 comedy “High Fidelity,” based on the Nick Hornby book of the same name. The film stars John Cusack as Rob Gordon, a conflicted record store owner who has just broken up with his girlfriend and begins examining his past romantic life in order to find some answers. Throughout the film, his obsession with pop culture is a major focus, and helps to tell the story.

This was a no-brainer for my friend and me — we are both obsessed with music, film and art to an unhealthy degree (we were having this conversation, after all), and we both have pretty poor luck when it comes to our love lives.

But there’s something nagging me about this theory. Maybe we’re trying too hard to see ourselves in our favorite music, or movies, or whatever. Maybe that’s all we can see in it. Then again, maybe that’s why we love them so much — we can see ourselves in Rob Gordon of “High Fidelity”; I can see myself in Kurt Cobain’s cryptic lyrics and shattered guitar playing; my friend sees himself in John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s adventurous tweaking of the then-young rock ’n’ roll genre.

So now it’s your turn, dear reader. I invite everyone to take a look at their favorite bands and movies and see what that says about your personality and your life. Maybe you’ll find something, like my friend and I did.