Everyone knows the effect that music can have on memory. You know how it is, you are going about your business and suddenly, there is the whisper of a song playing on some passing car stereo and you are brought back to your 21st birthday when they played NIN's "Closer" and your crush had you up against the mirror of a smokey dance club. Or maybe it's a memory of the first time you spent the night with your first love and you didn't have sex, but lay there feeling like it was the beginning of forever as U2's album "One" played on a loop. Maybe it's a memory of being 5 and singing and dancing in the neighbor's livingroom to "Copacabana" with a tablecloth for a sarong and banana for a microphone.
Maybe it's a memory of standing on the couch singing Blondie's "The Tide is High" with your roomates as you consume the last of the Malibu Rum together.
Maybe it is "Rock & Roll Lifestyle" and you remember that house party you went to in Davis where there was a band playing that not many people had heard of at the time.
Maybe, like yesterday, it's a song that reminds you of a night spent with a friend listening to James Taylor songs and reading A.A. Milne poems just days before your friend shoots himself in the head.
It is such a powerful thing. It's amazing to me how music can somehow burrow direct paths through your psyche straight to your soul to the point where they really become a part of your being.
Would I be the same person I am today if I had never heard "One"? Maybe. I would probably find other triggers that would make me think about my first love. But I can't think of anything that brings it all back in the course of a three minute song. In three minutes, I can remember all the joys, like when he showed up unexpectedly at my door years after we had been childhood playmates or when we took that trip to the beach and I took him to my favorite cliff on Willow Street Beach, where we lay on that rock that hangs out over the ocean for hours. I remember the fear, like when we got into a car accident on the way home from the beach or when I couldn't wake him one night after he had too much to drink. I remember the frustration when we couldn't have sex (because I was afraid of going that far with someone I loved) and we couldn't talk about my past because I was ashamed of how I lost my virginity. I remember the mistakes I made, like chosing to break up with him instead of facing our issues. All those moments come back to me in one neat little package and then fade away as Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars" comes on the radio and takes me on another trip.
I don't think I would trade those moments for anything, even the bittersweet and downright gut wrenching ones. Where would we be without them?
And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
And the three men I admire most:
The father, son, and the holy ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.
Maybe it's a memory of standing on the couch singing Blondie's "The Tide is High" with your roomates as you consume the last of the Malibu Rum together.
Maybe it is "Rock & Roll Lifestyle" and you remember that house party you went to in Davis where there was a band playing that not many people had heard of at the time.
Maybe, like yesterday, it's a song that reminds you of a night spent with a friend listening to James Taylor songs and reading A.A. Milne poems just days before your friend shoots himself in the head.
It is such a powerful thing. It's amazing to me how music can somehow burrow direct paths through your psyche straight to your soul to the point where they really become a part of your being.
Would I be the same person I am today if I had never heard "One"? Maybe. I would probably find other triggers that would make me think about my first love. But I can't think of anything that brings it all back in the course of a three minute song. In three minutes, I can remember all the joys, like when he showed up unexpectedly at my door years after we had been childhood playmates or when we took that trip to the beach and I took him to my favorite cliff on Willow Street Beach, where we lay on that rock that hangs out over the ocean for hours. I remember the fear, like when we got into a car accident on the way home from the beach or when I couldn't wake him one night after he had too much to drink. I remember the frustration when we couldn't have sex (because I was afraid of going that far with someone I loved) and we couldn't talk about my past because I was ashamed of how I lost my virginity. I remember the mistakes I made, like chosing to break up with him instead of facing our issues. All those moments come back to me in one neat little package and then fade away as Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars" comes on the radio and takes me on another trip.
I don't think I would trade those moments for anything, even the bittersweet and downright gut wrenching ones. Where would we be without them?
And in the streets: the children screamed,
The lovers cried, and the poets dreamed.
But not a word was spoken;
The church bells all were broken.
And the three men I admire most:
The father, son, and the holy ghost,
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died.
VIEW 8 of 8 COMMENTS
I think of a New Yorker article I read within the past few months about Muzak, and how heavily engineered the emotional experience of music can be sometimes, that it can be a tool of manipulation. Sometimes this shit is pretty transparent, but we can all unwittingly become sheep in the marketplace.
So I think the more we understand our own emotions and how a particular piece of music has a really personal, subjective effect that is unique to our individual experience, the more the mosic becomes our own point of reference.
Better, of course, for music to be a point of departure for self-discovery than to let it be an endless sentimental tape loop. But it's also cool and trippy how immediate the association can be, that music can give us a full glimpse at ourselves at another time and place. It can help us separate the wheat from the chaff.
But there will probably always be some songs, many of them sappy, that will almost always make me bawl, like "Sunshine on my Shoulder," which makes me think of a sad movie I saw about a kid who's mom died of cancer, and watching it as a little kid gave me a huge fear of losing my mom, or the first real visceral notion of what death might be about.
There's also a 70s pop/countryish song, I think maybe even by Olivia Newton John, that goes "Please mister, please, don't play B-17; it was our song, it was his song, now it's oo-oo-ooo-ver." Breaks me up every time, first hitting me at a time of homesickness at summercamp when I was 8 years old, then later thinking of friends and loved ones who died.
Beyond the emotional and evocative potential of music, maybe there's also some pieces of profound truth that resonate. I think of how many songs give me goosebumps, and part of that has to be that the music somehow resonates with what and where I am at that moment.