Lost in Music

Q magazine used to run this regular feature called “Lost in Music,” where they would have people recount significant times in their personal histories and note the specific songs that tie up to these memories. Quote: “Life’s Big Moments all come with songs attached, tracks that beam you back in time whenever they’re replayed. We all have them.” I know I do.

Somewhere in my heart by Aztec Camera

I became obsessed with a number of bands in high school (which, really, is what high school is for, along with first-time fumblings with the opposite sex, and maybe some learning and stuff) — bands like The Smiths, The Cure, XTC, The Stone Roses, and almost every act on the “10 of Another Kind” compilation. Aztec Camera remains particularly dear to me, because no other band’s songs seemed to go so well with the ridiculous highs and lows of my adolescent heart. This song in particular was special; I was going out with this girl in second year and we considered it “our song.” Because we were romantic and because we were idiots.

Risingson by Massive Attack

Aztec Camera: Music for fools in love

This is kind of cheating. The fact is, I can’t think of a single song that really brings back the late ‘90s for me. So I chose a song that I liked a lot, that would also somehow reflect the mood of the time — with its beats and hisses and pre-millennial tension and the sinister sound of impending technology, about to roll over us all. I don’t recall with too much clarity what I was doing in the late ‘90s. I had a relationship that lasted two years, and a bunch of freelance writing gigs, and I came out with a book of short stories. I also watched way too many music videos, most of them only because I was hoping a better one would come on next. This could be seen as a metaphor for the time but it’s probably best not to read too much into it.

Goodbye by The Sundays

Goodbye is, quite simply, my favorite Sundays song, and takes me back to my first real regular job (in the mid-2000s), at a music magazine — and a weekend when I went out of town with a couple of close friends from said magazine, and this played on the car stereo. Underpaid and over-smart (the latter, according to our very own boss), we were nevertheless having the occasional good time and not dreading what lay ahead so much, yet. That guitar bit near the end — not to mention the part where Harriet Wheeler’s voice soars and sings “As the heavens shudder, baby, I belong to you” — still sends lovely chills down my spine.

Displaced voices by Third World Summer

Unlike the other acts I’ve listed here, I can’t recall more than one song by Third World Summer. That may be less the result of the way we all consume music now (storing mass quantities of it on our hard drives and cherry-picking the “hits”), and more because TWS hasn’t actually come out with that many songs yet — not enough for what we used to call an “album,” anyway. Still, what a lovely song, this, imbued with a particular buzzy energy and a certain momentum, but also a strange dreamlike quality. Somehow it sounds to me as if it were written and performed to accompany my life at the moment, shimmery and still somehow hopeful as it is.