time place song: settings you remember

This was prompted by a recent Facebook exchange that gave me very specific memories of hearing two songs in two particular places. Concerts don't count, obviously — talking about hearing recordings, on the radio or CD/LP/cassette/MTV whatever. Can be something you heard by chance or put on deliberately, just a song that triggers a particular place and moment.

I'm sure we all have tons of these, so here's just a few:

— "You Give Love a Bad Name," Bon Jovi. I can't put a date to this, but it would have been the fall of 1986, shortly after I got my driver's license and while the song was on the charts. It peaked at #1 Nov. 29 of that year, so somewhere around there. I don't know why specifically it sticks in my head versus all the other songs I heard while driving the mostly rural roads around my parents' house at night, but I do remember having an opinion about it — "Actually, this kinda rocks" — and turning it up in the car. It's connected I'm sure to the new sense of freedom I had, the new ability to go where I wanted to go by myself, and turn up whatever I wanted to turn up on the radio. I think I remember the actual specific stretch of road I was on, or at least the vicinity.

— "Just Like Christmas," Low. Another motor vehicle memory, I think partly because it was the first time I heard the song (which I love) and partly for the novelty and incongruity of the setting. I was in a rented minivan with some friends driving from Tucson to Phoenix in June 2000. We were all at an alt-weekly conference in Phoenix but played hooky for the day to go see a college friend in Tucson. She showed us around the hip spots in town, including a used record store where I picked up Low's Christmas EP. I stuck it in the van's CD player on the drive back and completely remember the jingling bells playing while we cruised across the desert.

— "Umbrella," Rihanna. Walking down the sidewalk on the west side of First Avenue in Manhattan, between E. 63rd, where we lived at the time, and E. 67th, where there was a park I took my then-toddler oldest son to play every day. I already knew the song of course, this was spring of 2007, sometime between its release at the end of March and hitting #1 in June. I was pushing the stroller behind two young women, probably in their late teens, and we walked past a store that had its door open and the radio playing from inside. It was right at the "ella, ella, ella" part and both women just automatically bopped their heads and sang along. I remember thinking "wow this song is everywhere."

There may already be a thread like this, a desultory search didn't turn one up but of course it could be called a lot of different things so apologies if this duplicates past efforts.

Can't wait for the inevitable evolution into a thread about drugs and bonin'

? why. i don't think that's going to happen.

I swear I have a million of these but few are coming to mind...yet. but I love stuff like this. good thread!

Whew, I think about this alot which I'm sure is a symptom of aging and nostalgia. Three come to mind off the bat, usually related to hearing something for the first time.

"Welcome To The Jungle" Guns N Roses (and probably more of the album). Went from a tiny K-8 grade school to a large high school starting in Sept 1987, which felt like a huge change. I joined the cross country team on day one, and in one of the first few practices we had to get to a park in Philadelphia to run some hills. Freshman/sophomores got rides with older teammates who could drive and had cars so I was in the bed of someone's pickup truck for the first time ever (maybe last too? not that safe). I remember him blasting Appetite for Destruction, specifically peeling out of the school as Welcome To the Jungle blasted out that sliding window between the cab and the bed.

"Feel" Big Star / "In The Morning" Built to Spill (both albums really). Pre-www internet, there was a BBS at U of Iowa you could telnet into and talk about music/band stuff so would go there to find new music and whatnot. Many folks I knew through there would send tapes (and records!) to each other, which is how I found out about new and old stuff. I had borrowed my family's car for a week or two so I could drive back from college for Thanksgiving, about a 2 hour drive. The day I was leaving in late Nov 1994 a tape from my friend Jennie came in the mail and it had Built To Spill's There's Nothing Wrong with Love on one side, and a mix of songs from Big Star's first two albums on the other. I had never heard either band previously, and something about leaving school and driving solo with just those records cemented my love for them. Both of the opening songs were entrees into the bands themselves, when I hear "Feel" now I still am hearing that descending guitar figure through tape hiss in a shitty Buick.

"Hexenzsene" Unwound (really all of New Plastic Ideas and Fake Train). Similar to the above story, a different friend in May of 1994 sent me a tape with both of those Unwound albums on it. I was very much a procrastinator and waited til the night before huge projects to bang them out, not recommended. This tape arrived the day before some big project I had was due, where I'd be parked in the computer lab late in the night/morning. I don't have the tape anymore but I remember the j-card was made from brown-paper bag material, and I had never heard Unwound before this -- I played both sides of the tape over and over on a walkman. I remember especially being taken with New Plastic Ideas, especially Hexenzsene and Abstraktions, playing those over and over. Something about the anxiety of plowing through some huge final project and having this as the soundtrack just imprinted New Plastic Ideas super hard.

Love it. That's a perfect way to experience "Welcome to the Jungle." I have a much more quotidian memory of it, seeing it on Headbangers Ball in my dorm TV room — which I normally didn't pay much attention to because I wasn't a metal guy, but that song got me on first go.

Filter's "Take a Picture" reminds me of the cafeteria at the University Center at Florida State University. I was severely depressed all year, didn't associate with anybody, was briefly suicidal (the only time in my life where I actually made a plan to end things and then didn't go through with it at the 11th hour).

the song is not one I would enjoy out of context, but it would play on the cafeteria TV just about every night and the few moments of peace I ever experienced was eating lunch there by myself, so it reminds me of that every time.

i just had a weird reaction to that memory just now!

lol...

uhh - also, you guys are going to positively clown me but...

I had just started dating someone in early 2009, she was big into John Mayer, particularly Continuum (which is an album I like a lot, but at the time I didn't know it). I picked it up because I wanted to relate to her and her tastes.

we had just talked on the phone and I was feeling euphoric. I was driving to a Super Bowl party with my best friend hours later, and I was on cloud 9 with life, and "Belief" came on and I opened up the window to let the fresh air in and closed my eyes for a split second (because, well, I was driving) and it was just like an endorphin rush.

still good friends with her, even though it didn't work out.

I vividly associate pieces of music with apparently random places from my past which I went to decades before I heard the song. Not going to list these as it would be like describing boring dreams, but wonder if anyone else does this.

Three different decades, three different genres of music, all three in my car:

1976. Grover Washington Jr. "Knucklehead", my first year living away from home, small town, late at night, picking up some far away skip signal on AM radio.

1980s Nico "Desertshore." Driving through a snowstorm, hearing this for the first time on a recently purchased thrift store cassette.

1993: Earth. One of the tracks from their debut (probably the longest one?) on college radio in Richmond, Virginia. I had to stay in my car until the end to find out who it was, and then I was so dazed/transfixed I managed to lock my key in my car.

I brought this up on another thread, but the intro to "Silly Love Songs" takes me right back to roller skating around the time that song was released. It was a rink staple.

Side question: have any of you subsequently avoided the song in question because it might dilute that memory? Because surely the strongest association comes with the first re-listen.

I lived in Sydney for a bit 1999/2000 and got a job in the north of the city that took fucking ages to get to. One Friday, I finished and figured I'd walk back across the harbour bridge and find a different way home. I had one of those yellow sports Walkmans and a tape with the first Stone Roses album on one side and Still Bill on the other. The tape rolls round to 'I Wanna Be Adored' as I emerge from beneath a giant strut and I think, as the choppy guitars start, this is weirdly loud and a helicopter banks above me and the whole city tilts towards the river and its cheap and mesmerising and let the demon bring eternal recurrence I'm ready.

xp On the contrary, I seek the songs out. I'm old enough to enjoy the plunge into the nostalgia pool any number of times.

first CD I ever bought on release day was Surrender by The Chemical Brothers, I remember biking to the shop as quickly as I could after school, grabbing it, putting it in the Walkman, and biking around town. I still remember exactly where I was during each of the songs and those locations pop in my head every time I hear it. Even 24 years (!!) later

enochroot at 6:01 13 Jun 23

Side question: have any of you subsequently avoided the song in question because it might dilute that memory? Because surely the strongest association comes with the first re-listen

the beach boys - "holidays" - went to the jersey shore to meet someone i only knew from the internet. it went badly. she had absurd levels of childhood trauma. i was messed up in ways i couldn't begin to unravel, but i figured quitting my job and spending all my money flying to new jersey to meet this girl was as good a decision as any. the job was about to fire me anyway. she was really into type o negative and peter steele. i was really into the beach boys' _smile_ album. i played it for her and she said that "holidays" sounded like an incredibly sad song. suddenly it occurred to me, for the first time, that she was right. it would be decades before i started to realize that, in fact, everything about my life at that time was incredibly sad.

barnes & barnes - "fish heads" - they used to play the video for this all the time when i was eight, on a short-lived nickelodeon show called "turkey tv". i loved the song and was obsessed with it.

magma - mekanik destruktiw kommandoh - i was working at the highlands branch of the louisville free public library, walking to and from work because i didn't know how to drive a car, the buses didn't come very frequently, and besides, it was good exercise. i valued this time - i got to be away from all the stresses of life and just walk and listen to music on my cheap little walkman. this particular day, it was sunny when i started, but it soon became overcast. by the time i reached home, the rain had become a furious thunderstorm and the song had reached the climactic "mekanik kommandoh" part. the weather, my mood, the music, all of them fit together perfectly.

hah, that's super cool, I too remember my first listen to that album because I was on the highway and by the time of the climax I noticed I was going nearly 90 MPH

Filter's "Take a Picture" reminds me of the cafeteria at the University Center at Florida State University. I was severely depressed all year, didn't associate with anybody

Ugh, I have similar collegiate depression trigger songs (inc. 'Barely Breathing', Dionne Farris' 'I Know'). Mostly stuff that was in heavy rotation and piped through the student center speakers while I sat around having no idea what the fuck I was doing with myself.

On a lighter note: I used to sleep with the radio on in junior high and was awoken one morning during the vibes solo in Whitney Houston's 'Love Will Save the Day' simultaneous with one of those sunrises where the whole sky is a gorgeous orangey pink, and it was just such a lovely moment of tranquil bliss.

I completely lost the ability to process the English language one time while listening to the High Llamas' 'Nomads'. I knew the song and the lyrics well but that particular iteration was just total phonemic soup. It was utterly fascinating. I, uh...I might've been on something at the time, I dunno.

barnes & barnes - "fish heads"

lol just showed my kids this video a few weeks ago, they'd never heard of it, they were amused.

man imagine how I felt when I watched Babylon 5 for the first time during the pandemic and found out the actor who played Lennier was one half of Barnes and Barnes

oh man so many, will think a bit

the other Barnes just died recently, I think I posted about it on ILX but nobody cared. kind of a cool band though, they sound a bit Devo but weren't as good, in retrospect they were totally a precursor to They Might be Giants and Ween.

Oh, I don't know why I thought the other Barnes was Miguel Ferrer. I guess because he and Mumy otherwise seemed joined at the hip.

I remember the time I first heard REM's "Radio Free Europe" (the original single, not the Murmur remake) on my friend's mom's car radio as she drove us north on Route 29 in Virginia. More than 40 years ago and I can remember how the sun looked and everything

wasted at a college party the night after finals my sophomore year, The Kinks "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" comes on and my mind is blown

barnes & barnes - "fish heads" - they used to play the video for this all the time when i was eight, on a short-lived nickelodeon show called "turkey tv". i loved the song and was obsessed with it.

Last month, I was revisiting some early Strokes stuff (via an ILM discussion). I wrapped up with the first and last tracks from their 3rd album… “Red Light” somehow triggered a rush of nostalgia, strong enough to make me woozy, for the time in my life when the album came out. (It was especially the part with the swarming guitar that did it: Well, I saw your face, then I heard that song / It was so inviting, it hurt my bones…).

What’s funny is, that wasn’t a time in my life that I look back on with any great fondness or reverence. I was almost 30 (so well past the flush of youth); living with my partner, but not yet married, and no kids yet; having some fun, but also settling into life. No real markers or signposts in that stretch to make it stand out in retrospect. (A visit to Vegas, and poking around the hotel room specifically, was a specific and banal scene that the song conjured up, from around the time the album came out.)

So I didn’t know it was even possible to be nostalgic for those years; but somehow the song hit me hard, in a way that made me acutely aware of the distance between then and now. And, unsettlingly, it delivered an simultaneous epiphany of looking back from further in the future: “Someday, you may even be nostalgic for the present moment….”

(Pretty heavy stuff for one of the few enduring tracks from a mediocre album.)

Fleetwood Mac - Live, which I bought on day of release, December 8, 1980. So it's what I was listening to when my mother came up to tell me John Lennon was dead.

I vividly associate pieces of music with apparently random places from my past which I went to decades before I heard the song. Not going to list these as it would be like describing boring dreams, but wonder if anyone else does this.

― the world is your octopus (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Tuesday, 13 June 2023 17:31 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Yes! I do this all the time. Maybe not the places I visited decades ago part but I'll find that if I'm singing a song in my head I'm also thinking about a particular place with no real apparent connection to that song. There is a stretch of road close to home and an area of a park near where I lived about a decade ago which crop up most often but lots of others too

Another one that occurred to me: The fall day in 1993 when I met with my boss at the chain of suburban weeklies where I had my first journalism job after college and told him I was leaving to move to another state. I was moving with my then-partner to a place where neither of us had jobs or knew anybody, but we were starry-eyed 24-year-olds. I left his office and went out to the parking lot, started my car and "Free Fallin'" was on the radio. It felt perfect.

“never say goodbye” bon jovi

i played competitive social badminton on Friday nights after school.
when I was about 12 I hung around with this older girl Tammy who was maybe 16 or 17, she was cooler & grown up (to me), had a boyfriend with a car, the whole deal.

One night while we were sitting in the bleachers waiting for our next match, anf she asked if i’d heard Bon Jovi’s “never say goodbye” (i hadn’t yet) and she totally sang it to me.
The whole thing.
i think of her every time i hear it now
Especially that line:
“remember when we lost the keys/you lost more than that in my backseat” because I vividly remember how much she laughed as she sang that line & i laughed along with her … quietly mystified & having NO idea what she was laughing about (or what JBJ was singing about for that matter)

love those last two memories

That's great VG. What a way to hear a song. Also, competitive badminton is awesome, my favorite college gym class.

it was the only sport i enjoyed! i played all through high school from 12 til i was 17

First music I heard online was Massive Attack's "Risingson" when the NME's website had started to offer clips of new releases. I was at work, in an empty office at the end of the day, at a time when personal internet use in work time was still felt to be illicit. That intro, through the crappy PC speaker, on low volume...

I was 18 or maybe just turned 19 at a party in a kitchen where six or seven of us were passing around three brown paper bags with different flavors of Mad Dog and this came on the shitty little boom box and to some extent its been stuck in my head ever since.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1kEjj3Ej68

Grateful Dead 8/27/72 "Dark Star" in the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, AZ by myself on a sunny 90+ degree day in the fall. Just magical looking around at hummingbirds, cacti and life everywhere.

ok computer the entire winter of 2007 on my discman, riding the bus to school early mornings before dawn. we lived in a semi-rural area in one of the mountain valleys of utah, a few hundred feet higher than the bottom of the valley next to the canyon where the wind blew the snow across the fields. the mountains were right there. all of that just means that the album artwork blended in with the scenery with the music and there was this intoxicating feeling of escape and aloneness that meant the world to me as i was discovering just how fucked up my family situation was and the place and culture that i was a part of.

underworld - beaucoup fish, those last few tracks, specifically 'moaner' while riding in the family car along i-80 in the high desert of wyoming near dusk skirting a big thunderhead and lightning storm., probably around 2000-2001.

stars of the lid "austin texas mental hospital pt 1" and especially pt 2 driving along the sound north of vancouver towards whistler, again on a family road trip. it's a little weird how many huge family road trips we did when i was in my teens and early twenties. i loved getting out and traveling, watching from the window in my own world, it felt like escape which i craved desperately, that was maybe part of why we did so many. but they were always bittersweet and cruelly double-edged because my parents had awful arguments and things just got miserable and i was v sad on these trips. anyway that looped 12 minute string fugue sounded like drowning deep in the sound and that's what i imagined. it was when dusk turns into night. maybe a summer or two after wyoming above.

i'm much happier now thankfully.

last summer around 1:10 am at the club on a thursday night, a woman, likely trans, had been dancing alone to the music i was playing for 30 minutes straight and i decided to end with the eris drew track "quivering in time," it was really beautiful.

oh man the entire autechre nts release was my soundtrack to trail running around moab during the spring, summer and fall of 2018, perfect alien soundscapes matching perfect alien landscapes.

ok computer the entire winter of 2007

yikes, i meant 1997-1998

ha, ty, I was confused

related to the current "Off The Wall" poll, my love for the title track is certainly due to hearing it for the first time blasting out of the arcade speakers in 1979, alien and bewitching

Will never forget doing the 5 Boro Bike Tour in NYC about 15 years ago and pulling into John Paul Jones Park in Brooklyn for the last big rest stop before the final stretch over the Verrazano into Staten Island. Bikers milling about a massive open space, rehydrating, getting energy bars, and blasting through the air was the extended version of the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song. Biking on the BQE and other elevated highways that are normally high speed traffic nightmares is its own brand of surreality, and hearing several additional verses to this song that I had heard five million times and knew every little moment of by heart seemed completely of a piece with that. A magical day. Anyway smell ya later

I associate the entirety of The Wall with the shitty paper route I had my junior year in high school. Along with ABACAB and Ghost in the Machine, it was my constant companion on freezing cold mornings. I also associate it with the death of John Belushi, about which I learned while delivering papers--or at least that's how I remember it.

"Foreplay / Long Time" - Boston

I was 11 in fall of '76. All the kids from the neighborhood used to hang out together - the "be home before dinner" kind of loose ends when there wasn't much to do. One older kid had a car with a great stereo system. A few of us piled into the backseat to be close to the speakers and he drove us around so we could hear the new hot album he bought on 8-track. He skipped the singles on side 1 of Boston and went straight to Foreplay / Long Time. We listened in awe to the groovy organ/bass interplay with the loud/quiet dynamics on Foreplay and the immense tension as everything falls away before the track gets ready to blast into Long Time. Of course we didn't know what Foreplay meant back then...

I associate *Live After Death* with my paper round. I was 14; I can absolutely conjure the same feeling I used to get listening to 'The Trooper' and certain doorsteps I vaulted off, copying Dave Murray and Adrian Smith's solos.

I have a random snippet of memory of crossing the square in front of the Hotel de Ville in Paris, walking toward the river, while listening to "Tonight" by the Soft Boys on my iPod. Probably around age 21 or so. I'm in Paris for three days and today I found myself in front of the Hotel de Ville, so I pulled out my iPod and put on "Tonight" and crossed the square to the river and it was a very strange feeling.

that's cool! hopefully the random snippet of memory was a positive (or neutral) memory for you.

My cousin's outdoor wedding on the beach in north county San Diego late spring 2001, the superb DJ threw "Get Your Freak On" on later in the evening and we all went nuts on the dance floor. Hearing that track for the first time at club levels through a proper soundsystem could not have been more perfect. The Osaka-dialected hype intro announcing the track, which immediately drops a Bhangra tumbi/tabla minimalism meets Virginia Beach beats at an almost garage bpm... then Missy on the topline. It was really a watershed first listen. Pretty sure we all ran and jumped into the ocean not long after the song ended.

Would you say you ... got your freak on?

of all things, Cam'Ron's "Hey Ma" reminds me of my first trip to Chicago (ok, LINCOLNSHIRE) in 2011. it was a business trip, but the training I was leading was so easy that I got to spend a lot of time driving around the city, having fun. and I was playing the Cam'Ron album with that song on it frequently.

was a much more peaceful time in my life, so I have fond feelings when I hear the song.

I welled up to Sam Prekops self titled album when arriving to Chicago and riding the train for the first time. Now I can’t listen to the album anymore because that memory is so damn embarrassing (who wells up to showrooms? A loser, that’s who).

Destroyers - streethawk always takes me back to this massive empty ski lodge I had to myself in big white, winter 2014. Would go skiing all day, then listen to that album on repeat all night. Destroyers - your blues as well for walking through the streets of Tokyo. They always take me back

Friday, December 2nd, 2022 - I was driving up north going through southern Vermont. I'd gotten bored with the music choices on my phone so I switched over to see if there were any good radio stations. I catch one that's playing the tail end of some Aerosmith song, so I decide to stick with it for another tune. Up next is a song I'd never heard before but immediately has me tearing up as the lyrics and the isolation of the solo drive paired perfectly - Willie Nelson's "Angel Flyinng Too Close to the Ground."

loving these posts.

Willie Nelson example is great. the moment of discovering a tune you haven't heard before in a road trip setting is the best. especially if it's at sunset or evening time.

Tame Impala's "New Person, Same Old Mistakes" is almost unplayable to me now, as I mentioned in another thread, because it was a song my best friend plays often on her playlist, and was playing on the way up to Baltimore on our road trip, the one in which we returned separately because of a huge fight I caused when I was drunk and belligerent.

we've repaired our friendship since then, and I've turned a corner, so I probably shouldn't still beat myself up for it, but that memory of that night is still a nightmare in my mind and this song is inextricable from it.

that Willie Nelson tune had me get around to making a playlist of music through my life that's come on through those late night dark drives that either I'd never heard before or had, but the song in question and particular setting elevate it to another place. Hearing The Breeders "Oh!" while driving through dark winding roads of Western Massachusetts at 2 AM is a completely different vibe when pulled out of it's album context.

“The Sea and Cake - Four Corners” takes the cake for most surprising driving+song=euphoria moment for me. Driving a long down hill hinterland mountain with that blasting on a cool spring day, amazing.

Listened to the Stooges Fun House for the first time driving double the speed limit on an old inland Australian country road during sunset. I have never driven the fast before, nor since, but the isolated location + power of those songs was perfect for it (though yeah of course it was silly).

Another embarrassing one was being 17 and breaking my leg shooting down a hill because my favourite song of the time, fireworks by animal collective randomly came on shuffle through my 10,000+ songs on my iPod classic. I took it as a sign from God that I was born for this moment, to bomb this hill and shoot out the other side to bask in the glory. Instead, I flew off my board, my leg hitting a metal pole while still mid air, immediately snapping, getting spun around by it and landing hard on the concrete. I got to spend my last 3 months in high school on crutches. Good times. Every time I hear the song I get to laugh at myself again

Recent music discovery while driving was on a whim putting “Songs Ohio’s Blue Factory Flame” while driving alone on a highway. First time in a while I have been blown away by a song. The sun had just disappeared behind the trees in the horizon when those slow slow slow drums began to fill the space and Molina sings “when I die/ put my bones in an empty street / to remind me how it used to be”. If I did not have somewhere to be I would have pulled over and listened to the last three songs on that album on repeat for the rest of the night.

Haircut 100 - Love Plus One

The scene: my pops second (penultimate?) wedding, held in his best friends suburban home/backyard, modest but it's a big yard, savings spent on fancy catering and lights in the trees and a modular dancefloor, beautiful

there is no dj however I played them down the aisle to a solo classical guitar arrangement of Savage Garden's "Truly Madly Deeply" because they decided that was their song and lol but yeah alright it's your day, they have otherwise prepared playlists for the evening

formalities are done, sun is setting, time to dance, on goes my dad's middle aged white guy dance playlist (Leo Sayer - you make me feel like dancin' etc)

bride rushes over to tell me no one wants to dance, please scare up a dance playlist on my ipod right quick

did what I could, there was dancing, tried to include some ringers (dancing queen, got to give it up) but I also know the bride is a new wave nerd

they're taking a break, grabbing a drink, haircut 100 drops;
bride, running, screaming: "ohmygod if you love me you will come dance right now!"

rush of family and friends and strangers onto the dancefloor, outside in the dark at night, lots of lights and love, pretty good party might get married myself someday

strange urge to listen to the Simply Red version of "If You Don't Know Me By Now" today. it reminds me of sitting in the back of my parent's car, circa 1989, when it was stormy out and mom was stopping in to pick something after Eckerd's. My brother and I had just gotten out of our daily summer camp.

and I was feeling the early feelings of anxiety/depression in the back seat, not knowing what they were called at the time. but the song helped soothe me a bit (I was a sucker for soul as a kid, even the blue-eyed variety)

Jimi Hendrix, 'Electric Ladyland' album - first time I listened to this album was during a ferocious thunderstorm.

Love that, Florin. The right song connecting with the right crowd is such a moment.

Prompted by Ned's post about Shannon's "Let the Music Play" — one of those songs that I have a weirdly specific memory of. One of my adolescent chores was cleaning the bathrooms, and I would usually time it so I could listen to Casey Kasem. I remember scrubbing the tiles while Casey told the story of how Shannon insisted on keeping her office day job until the song actually hit the charts. I don't know why that impressed itself on me, I guess maybe realizing in a concrete way that the people I heard on the radio could also, like, put on professional clothes and go work in some drab office. Anyway, yes, an all-time jam.

fall 2003, i’d just started college in NYC, tho i was at the time frequently homesick for my town in NJ (this didn’t last long). i had visited home for the weekend and i’d accidentally left my cellphone (my first one ever!) at my parents’ house. my dad worked in jersey city then so i agreed to meet him near his office to reclaim it. i took the PATH to exchange place, talk talk’s spirit of eden in my discman. as i ascended that seemingly endless escalator into a clear, crisp, sunny autumnal day with a beautiful azure sky, the choir on “i believe in you” came in and i felt something like the holy spirit moving thru me at that moment, in jersey city of all places, in the middle of completing this very banal task. that motion of rising to meet the sky is the first thing i think of whenever i listen to that song, still.

oh that's beautiful

that is a GREAT one donna!

I have a bit of an intertwined old/new one.

One of my dear friends got breast cancer at 24, and beat it, and began doing a breast cancer fundraiser with music. I've been doing it since 2013, and in 2015, we performed "Hear My Song" from Songs from a New World and we'd get chills singing it every night, because it's a beautiful piece with jazzy chords. We bring it back almost all the time.

I hadn't worked much with her since the pandemic, but she was invited to do a small performance for a local banquet and asked me to join. I said yes - but the rehearsal date was the day after dad landed back in the hospital, and at the time, we weren't sure of his prognosis, and I was really emotional. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to make it.

Dad rebounds pretty well that next morning so I'm good to go and I go to sing it, and the people there are pretty much everybody who was there back in 2015, like a time capsule, sans one new person. we had a glorious rehearsal making music together for two hours, and I forgot how much I enjoyed putting things like that together. my friend gave me a huge hug and everybody else was also really supportive, my other buddy talking about how we need to catch up.

On the drive back, I put on Cynic's Traced in Air, and "King of Those Who Know" was finishing up while I was crossing the bridge over Lake Jessup in Sanford, FL, sun out, beautiful weather (ok, it was a wee bit hot but good enough). Water glistening. as the song ended, this very rustic jazzy/country riff ends the song, and it reminded me of the song I'd just sang at the rehearsal for the fundraiser, and I thought back to how the five of us at that rehearsal had been performing together over a decade because of how much we all love my friend, and happy tears ran down my cheek. Later on that night, I saw Cynic and processed my emotions about Dad while I listened to the beautiful set. that day was an inspirational moment in time unlike I've had in years.

so even though it's only been a month, any time I hear the end of that song, it reminds me of that beautiful Saturday where all of the dark clouds of my life parted for a moment. but also of the amazing warm feeling of rehearsing with the same 5 people who have been singing together for over a decade for a common cause - our love for our dear friend - and also seeing them all after a few years of barely seeing any of them. I hope this memory stays bonded to this 30 seconds of music forever.

beautiful post, neanderthal <3

Lovely post Neanderthal

that is a GREAT one donna!

I have a bit of an intertwined old/new one.

One of my dear friends got breast cancer at 24, and beat it, and began doing a breast cancer fundraiser with music. I've been doing it since 2013, and in 2015, we performed "Hear My Song" from Songs from a New World and we'd get chills singing it every night, because it's a beautiful piece with jazzy chords. We bring it back almost all the time.

I hadn't worked much with her since the pandemic, but she was invited to do a small performance for a local banquet and asked me to join. I said yes - but the rehearsal date was the day after dad landed back in the hospital, and at the time, we weren't sure of his prognosis, and I was really emotional. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to make it.

Dad rebounds pretty well that next morning so I'm good to go and I go to sing it, and the people there are pretty much everybody who was there back in 2015, like a time capsule, sans one new person. we had a glorious rehearsal making music together for two hours, and I forgot how much I enjoyed putting things like that together. my friend gave me a huge hug and everybody else was also really supportive, my other buddy talking about how we need to catch up.

On the drive back, I put on Cynic's Traced in Air, and "King of Those Who Know" was finishing up while I was crossing the bridge over Lake Jessup in Sanford, FL, sun out, beautiful weather (ok, it was a wee bit hot but good enough). Water glistening. as the song ended, this very rustic jazzy/country riff ends the song, and it reminded me of the song I'd just sang at the rehearsal for the fundraiser, and I thought back to how the five of us at that rehearsal had been performing together over a decade because of how much we all love my friend, and happy tears ran down my cheek. Later on that night, I saw Cynic and processed my emotions about Dad while I listened to the beautiful set. that day was an inspirational moment in time unlike I've had in years.

so even though it's only been a month, any time I hear the end of that song, it reminds me of that beautiful Saturday where all of the dark clouds of my life parted for a moment. but also of the amazing warm feeling of rehearsing with the same 5 people who have been singing together for over a decade for a common cause - our love for our dear friend - and also seeing them all after a few years of barely seeing any of them. I hope this memory stays bonded to this 30 seconds of music forever.

― Make the chats AI (Neanderthal), Tuesday, September 19, 2023 2:15 PM bookmarkflaglink

Last night, I lost the necklace with dad's ashes. it's not looking good that I will find it. Fortunately, dad's ashes aren't gone, we spread some but not all, so I was able to buy myself a replacement, but I was still very upset that something so important to me, I hadn't taken care of (I think I left it in my AirBnb, which is 2.5 hours away). It was putting me in a bad space mentally before my Christmas party, so I instinctually put on Cynic's Traced in Air, which contains "King of Those Who Know", which I referenced upthread.

it had the same effect on me as it did last year, the memory of that temporary parting of the clouds happened and came back to me and it restored me back to a peaceful state which didn't leave me all night. I can still see those sunny, gorgeous blue skies that I was driving through when I heard it. I'm sure this effect will wear off of this song after a while but I'm glad I have it.