You and Your Memories

how music informs and shapes what we remember and how remember it

I’m 16 years old. I’m at a party in somebody’s basement, a room decorated to resemble a cave. There are black lights and black light posters and a leather futon with matching leather chairs. Kids mill around, passing a smuggled bottle of vodka between them to pour into their sodas. A boy I like, a boy who just moved here from Canada and has the exotic name of Jacques, sits next to me. Steely Dan plays, side 1 of Aja. The long winded “Deacon Blues” has just started. It is 1978.

Jacques spends the rest of the song trying to find a subtle way to put his arm around me. He fidgets and fusses and moves a little closer and by the time he’s done the pretend “I’m tired” stretch and moves his arm behind my neck, “Deacon Blues” has ended and someone asks me to flip the record over. I’m hesitant to move, but I’m on record player duty and it’s the one job keeping me from having to socialize. I get up and flip Aja to side 2. When I get back Jacques is gone and Bobby Wilson is sitting on the futon where the boy I was crushing on used to be. I sigh wistfully and make my way upstairs as “Peg” drifts from the speakers. I run into Jacques at the top of the stairs and he brushes past me as if the arm thing never happened.

40 odd years later I’m deep in a “related artists” wormhole on Spotify and I come upon Steely Dan. I immediately click on Aja and I’m transported to that basement party and the sweet awkwardness of Jacques. I listen to the whole album and then make my way backward through the band’s discography, hitting on all the songs that bring it all back; the football field at school, Pinball Palace, Field 6 at Eisenhower Park, the bus to Jones Beach.

At some point it occurs to me that I haven’t regularly listened to Steely Dan in many years. But here I am, listening to them as if they were my favorite band, savoring the melodies and lyrics, reminiscing in time to the rhythm. Nostalgia makes you do weird things.

I’ve done the same with other bands, ranging from Led Zeppelin to Goldfinger. Each band brings with it their own memories, specific life moments that stick in your mind like a flyer stapled to a telephone pole. The memories have wear and tear, I remember pieces of them and sometimes those pieces are ragged and torn but when I put on the music associated with those memories, they become full and vibrant and whole.

Music sits in our brain and waits for a cue, and when it gets that cue it stirs up images you associate with it. Memories you didn’t know you had. Times you forgot. I might not have remembered Jacques at all if not for my Steely Dan binge.

So this is where I find myself wading hip deep in nostalgia, trudging through the murky waters of my past to a soundtrack of music I haven’t listened to in ages. The feeling I get when I play Offspring’s “Come Out and Play” is one of wistfulness; I don’t like the song. I don’t even like the Offspring. But my son as a toddler loved this tune and despite my condemnation of it, it brings back such sweet memories that I’m forced to listen. When it comes to nostalgia, we don’t always listen to the music we love, we often listen to the music that brings up moments we love.

Many years ago my grandfather was in long term care home passing away his remaining days. They would often sit the residents of the home in a common room and play music for them. It was the music of the 30s and 40s, songs from their youth. Occasionally grandpa would recognize a song. His face would brighten, his eyes light up. You could see the flicker of recognition and understand that there were memories dancing in his brain in that moment. For a man who remembered nothing, not even his grandchildren, those moments were magical to us, and it was music that did it. No stories we told him, no photographs did the trick. Yet the sound of Andrew Sisters could bring him back to us, however briefly.

I often think of myself in an old age home, sitting in my rocker trying to remember the past, the present, anything. I wonder what music my children will play for me to bring me forward for a few minutes. Will they sit in my room and play my Spotify playlist for me, the sounds of Manchester Orchestra or Queens of the Stone Age or Steely Dan floating softly through the air while they wait for an instant of recognition? Maybe I’ll think of concerts with my kids, or driving to Rhode Island to visit my sister, or my son dancing to the Offspring, or maybe it will just be my awkward moment with Jacques. I may not be able to remember much at an advance age, but there will always be music to pull me back in.

Think I’ll go listen to Aja.