This isn’t a song you’ve thought about since you last heard it, yet, within a couple of lines before the chorus, you find yourself somewhere else entirely. Physically, no. You’re still holding your cup of coffee. Your jacket is still wet. However, a piece of you has traveled back to a different street, at a different time, to a different version of yourself; you were listening to this same song when life had been unfinished in another way.
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That’s the strange ability of music. It doesn’t simply play in the background. It gets attached to normal places. So normal that they eventually cannot be remembered without a sound.
Songs Transform Normal Experiences Into Fixed Points
You will likely fail to recall the date of a night out, the name of the bar, and what everyone was wearing. But listen to the right song, and everything comes back vividly, where the table was located by the window. The sticky floor. Who laughed so loud? The cold air when you stepped out. Music provides a frame for normal, mundane experiences. Making it simpler for your memory to file away.
Certain songs are memory “bookmarks”, they evoke an emotion for you. While you may be unable to describe how or why certain feelings were created in your mind during a particular experience, the tone and feel of the music will often serve as a reminder of when and where you felt those emotions.
Normal Places Appear To Have A Different Sound After Major Events In Our Lives Happen
An alley shop is just an alley shop until it becomes associated with a memory. A bus stop is simply a place to catch a bus unless you stand at one after getting either positive/negative information or engaging in a conversation that affects the remainder of your week.
When you go back to where these things happen, most of the time, the place seems less crowded than before. This isn’t because anything on earth has changed; rather, it’s the person standing there that has. Music can help illustrate how different people are.
It could be possible that you’ve heard music when you walked home from school, as long as you remember it was during that time. And then there it is, playing at a grocery store. The space between the you who used to walk home from school and the you of today appears very small for a moment. However, you may have grown up. Your problems will certainly be different. Perhaps you’re working. Maybe you have kids. However, for a moment, the “you” from before is right there.
That isn’t nostalgia. That is so much more real than that. A song helps remind you that your life has layers. Much more of you exists in places you walk by daily and don’t even think about.
Lyrics Provide Context
The melody can draw you in quickly. Lyrics provide context for why a song sticks with you. A single lyric can feel as though it belongs to an area in your life.
You may remember hearing a particular track in your friends’ car. Then later, you went searching for the track, because one phrase kept echoing in your mind. And that search may bring you directly to something specific, such as “Meet Me On The Corner”, not due to your studying of the song, but because you are attempting to recapture the feelings surrounding it.
Lyrics can help to clarify a fuzzy memory. They add definition to aspects of an experience that weren’t expressed verbally. A song about waiting may be permanently tied to a railway station. A song about leaving may be tied to the motorway at night. A song about hope may be tied to your kitchen, where you planned things with someone you love. It is not necessary that the words perfectly describe your circumstances. It is enough if they closely relate to what happened then.
The Right Song Can Change How You Feel About A Place
At times, a song will do more than just make you remember where you were. After hearing it for the first time, it will change how you feel about that location after this. A quiet street you have always walked down before, without really paying attention, now makes sense with the music. A late-night takeaway food shop becomes warmer, as well as nicer, due to one particular piece of music being played over the ceiling speakers. Months or years go by, and the physical environment around you has not changed, but now the space somehow feels like home. Your memory attached music to an ordinary location, so now that location has a pulse.
Why Older Songs Remain Relevant
It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that at 16, a song is about getting away. But at 27, it will be about forgiveness. And ten or twenty years after that, it could simply remind you of all the ways you need to be kinder to yourself now. It’s you who changes, but nothing else does. That is why we always go back to the same songs over time. We follow them with us on our journey. New layers form around what the original meaning was, yet still underneath, there remain all of the layers that have come before.
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Therefore, it isn’t so much that the music itself defines each ordinary place, but rather the way we experience this music as lived in by these places. Music heard in certain places is never separate from life. The music becomes a part of its very fabric. Therefore, when one day (many years later) an old favorite comes on while you are out somewhere, let it play. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a huge moment. Just see where it takes you, who it brings back. How much of your life is still embedded in the sounds you hear?