Rememberin the Love

The past few weeks I have had numerous nostalgia-inducing musical experiences. I know that sounds a little overly existential, but really all I mean is that I've been hearing songs (or snippets of songs) that make me think of entire albums, entire catalogs, entire sections of my life in very real, viceral, even startling ways. Ten seconds of a Rufus Wainwright song brought back the vividness of a mid-Cross-Canada trip through Northern Ontario, complete with smells (cold forest), sights (endless pine trees interrupted only by bedrock and sudden lakes), and feelings (overwhelming melencholea). This may have been heightened by the innate cinematic nature of the particular CD (Want One... or was it Want Two...?) but similar experiences (a snippet of Snow Patrol vividly recalling a giant tire dump in Cape Breton, and mid-90s Matt Good Band bringing back the first set I ever worked on) have forced me to acknowledge a trend: I am having flashbacks.

Clearly this means that I am either some sort of super hero or I am in an elaborate American soap opera (because stuff like that just doesn't happen in the British ones). Either way its a rather pleasant way to be reminded of the power of music to remind us of an otherwise unreachable experience.

I recently read an NPR articule writen by vinyl collector Ian Nagoski, in which he put forth the following idea:

"When you listen to a record what you're receiving is a kind of sonic sculpture of the air molecules that recreates that time and that place in that room where the air molecules were vibrating in the same way. You're living in a reproduction of the air molecules created by that person, in that moment of their life, and reliving not a memory, but almost experiencing it with them."

This comment so perfectly expresses by idea of music, I could not imagine even attempting to paraphrase it. Not does it describe the moment of the recording, but the collection of moments during which you have ever heard that song, album, or artist. Each time you listen to a song, it brings back each of those moments, temporarily folding time in such a way that they become temporarily accessible, something that is quite difficult to achieve under normal circumstances. It is one of the many reasons I love music- its ability to help you relive the past, to make you remember the love.

-E

PS Because I am a huge dork I have also spent the evening reliving a different kind of 'remembering the love,' that is the love of a very certain period of time in my life (third year university) via a rather odd annual tradition- the celebration of Robbie Burns Day as 'Billy Boyd Day' aka Hobbit Day aka I watch all three Lord of the Rings movies back to back while eating Hobbit food (usually an elaborately shire-like cheese, spinach and carrot soup,with some strikingly-similar-to-tea-biscuits style lambas bread) while drinking scotch and/or Guinness... Though this year the tradition has been undertaken all by my lonesome, it has not failed to bring about the usual sort of loverly nostalgia to which I have been accustomed... One might not think these warm fuzzy feelings would be the result of a scotch-laiden watching of epic battle scenes, but it doesn't stop it from being true any more than music bringing about such a state of mind.