Musical Moments - The Songs That Remember Us

Driving along a cliff edge, twists and turns ahead of me, a ferocious, powder blue river carving its way through the gorge below. I found myself smiling, excited at the feelings trying to burst out through my chest.

But that excitement settled to something more subtle than a heart explosion. Lower. Quieter.

My solar plexus. That space above your stomach and between the lower ribs that, when experiencing the gentle hum of true joy, feels like it’s made of marshmallow Dream topping.

The freedom of the roads, the independence, the scenery, enhanced by the music from the speakers of my small but mighty hire car as I effortlessly steer along this wild and winding French road.

This song. There’s something so moving about it and it’s perfect for open roads and joyful feelings. It reminds me of passion for the moment and gratitude for everything that I have.

But it’s not the first time I’ve heard this song.

You know the one. The song that was once all about one particular day.  The sunshine, the long drive, that feeling of warmth and ecstasy that fills you every time you hear it and think back to that one perfect moment when you first heard it, first really heard it.

But then, that song can also be the one that brings you to tears, when that lovely, perfect memory suddenly becomes attached to a string of other, much more painful memories, like a decaying daisy chain. 

Previously, this was a song I associated with a perfect morning, enjoying the open road and a stolen moment shared with someone I was secretly falling for.  Over the years that followed it became a song I associated with a person, and slowly a song I associated with hurt. Every time it played after that it only reminded me of the devastating pain of losing that love in the years that followed.

So many times, I’ve experienced the demise of perfectly good music to less than perfect memories of a person.

The song plays now and it moves me because it carries a feeling in its instruments and the rhythm they’re played at, regardless of the words. I’d avoided it for two full years; except to use it as an occasional tear-jerker.

But what about when the bad memories fade?  Have you ever listened to a song that once encouraged you into sadness and instead felt an overwhelming joy?  The joy of being able to listen to that song again. The joy of knowing you can let go of the past. The joy of associating that song with a new memory, and one that isn’t and hopefully won’t become tainted.

Here it was, returning now on this wild French road to remind me how far I’ve come since then. Now, it coursed through my veins like this was the only moment it had ever been made for and it represented something new. Healing. Recovery. Release of the old making way for new.

There’s something incredible about the way that music can do that. Move us through emotions. One single song, the soundtrack to so many moments that may or may not turn out to be significant in the end.

I am often moved by music and there is something profound about the bond it creates between us and the moment it moved us the most. How strange the human mind is that we often forget entire years of our lives, but the single opening beat of a particular song can bring back a single afternoon in perfect detail.

It’s unpredictable too. We usually don’t know which songs will become important to us until the moment has passed, much like the moment itself. One minute we are in it, enjoying it, our senses are broadly aware that it’s a good or a bad moment, but it might not be until years later that we realise the small details of that event, or non-event, the sounds we heard either in the distance or right there on the radio… They will be part of what haunts us about that moment when we look back on it later down the line.

None of us consciously choose the soundtrack to our lives, we’re just living in a never-ending dressing room montage scene of a chick flick, or the death of a favourite character on that show you love. Someone is walking around Tesco right now, with no idea that the in-store radio is playing such a big part in the Truman Show of their lives. Someone else is welling up at a breakup song that will one day be their fight song. The one that represents the day they got their strength and independence back.

It can be easy to assume that painful things will always hurt or to crave the good things we hope might last forever. Feelings, people, places, photographs, songs. But everything is temporary, and eventually we often find that life rewrites the meaning for us.

The song, in fact that whole playlist for me, becomes evidence that healing happened, despite that I wasn't tracking it or even at all aware that I was moving on, letting go.

We spend so much of life worrying about whether we're making the right memories with the right people in the right places, while memory itself seems to have very little interest in what we thought was important. Instead, it steals strange little souvenirs. A song on a French road. A particular smell. The colour of the sky on a Tuesday afternoon.

And years later it hands them back to us and says "Here. You might want this again", reminding us (if we allow it to) not only who we were, but how far we've travelled since.

So, who are we to decide which moments are going to shape and define us, which songs will be our fight songs, our guilty pleasures or our belt-it-out-in-the-shower song. The artist had no idea what they were creating when they wrote it, and you have no idea the memories you’re wiring into place when you hear it.

Sometimes the greatest proof that we've healed isn't found in a journal entry, a milestone or a great epiphany. Sometimes it's just finding that one song you couldn't bear to hear, and noticing that now you sing along to all the words again without the lump in your throat.

If you haven’t found evidence of your healing yet, it doesn't usually show up with fireworks or a certificate to say you've completed the process. More often, it sneaks up on you years later. A watched pot never boils. Everything is temporary. This too shall pass.

One day, quite unexpectedly, life hands us back an old song and we realise it no longer belongs to the moment. It belongs to the journey.

I drove the most beautiful road today.  It was a winding road and a dangerous one.  It may or may not have had a speed limit but I chose ignorance and decided to take the road at a speed I found both safe and enjoyable.  I felt an overwhelming sense of freedom and the song that once played my journey along a wide-open red dirt road in Australia made its comeback.

This song is mine again.

It belongs to a new road.