A year ago my hard drive crashed and I lost the music collection I’d been building since college. Much of the music I listened to regularly I had in albums on CD, but a good portion of the songs I lost were from various bits and pieces of soundtracks and compilations, mixes gifted from friends, albums I no longer liked and CDs acquired as a joke and then neglected. The kind of songs I’d forget I had until they came up in the playlist. At one point I’d backed up all of these stray songs on a variety of miscellaneous mixes I made for things like road trips or mowing the grass; I liked to throw in surprises to shake things up. But when my hard drive crashed, not long after a +1000 mile move, and I couldn’t remember the fate of these made-for-discman CDs.
Someone's stockpile of disc-shaped time machines.
Music is said to help aid memory retention. So is repetition. This means its easier to learn state capitals or the letters of the alphabet when they’re set to a tune, but it also explains some of the contents of my music collection. I have songs, decades old, that I hated when they first came out. In between then and now something has happened: some kind of moment or person got tied up with that song, in my head, and now they are linked. I keep them because you can use these kinds of songs to time travel.
Certain songs have the ability to conjure up whole moments with a kind of thickness – moments that are otherwise accessible only unreliably. When I accidentally found my stray CDs a month ago it was like recovering a stash of lost time machine. Since then I’ve been copying them indiscriminately to my laptop: tastes change, even memories change, but who knows which unlikely song might unlock a once familiar detail I might not want to throw away. Dave Matthews Band has a history of making my skin crawl, but there’s a song that reminds me of an old friend and an autumn when we were roommates.
Overplayed pop songs can make for powerful time machines. At the height of their popularity, they seep through the open window of the car in the next lane, they played constantly on the radio station at work, they waft overhead while waiting in line at the grocery store. They’re everywhere, so they get into everything, and come to carry echoes of that everything themselves. I keep an copy of Nelly Furtardo’s “I’m Like a Bird” because it carries reverberations of a summer almost ten years ago. To my ears it sounded forgettable, but it wasn’t quite. Repetition is said to aid memory retention, and that summer it was a hit. It wasn’t even a great summer. When I think back on that summer now, it has an anxious and uncertain tone to it, and nothing much really happened. It’s that tone I remember when I hear the song, rather than any specific event – an echo of what that summer felt like, in all its affective banality. Some times – not every year but maybe once every several years — I even like to (if “like” is the right word) put on songs from times that I don’t always want to remember. It is a way to keep in touch. Listening to music as a form of time travel is an exercising in storymaking, imagining what then was like from the perspective of now. In making up and rehearsing that story, it also lets different times, in some incarnation, for better or worse be a part of what is now.
Image credits: pierre-arnaud gillet
Anyone want my tapes?
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