Does a song or an album or a band have the ability to affect the way a person turns out? The way a person is? Almost every one of my favorite songs directly correlates to some event or period in my past. When I had my first girlfriend, and was driving around in my first car smoking cigarettes and skipping school, I was listening to a lot of Wilco and The Band. But would those experiences have been different had I been listening to Springsteen and The Byrds? A huge part of those memories (and a lot of my memories) is the music I listened to. But would I be a different person today had I been listening to something else?
I think so. At least to an extent. All of those experiences were felt in a certain way because of the music I was listening to. That’s fucked up to think about, but I’m pretty sure it’s true. Or does the music you listen to reflect what you’re doing? Or is it both?
I don’t know, but I like this. I like that music ties in with my past. It forms sections of time as complete packages — not just bits and pieces scattered about. I can hear a song I used to listen to and immediately I know what I liked, what girl I was into, what I was doing back then, and what I thought about, what the weather was like, who my friends were; the list goes on. And I’m kind of an unreasonably nostalgic person, so this is nice.
Some people don’t seem to understand my affinity for nostalgia (nor do they seem to understand why anyone would want it in the first place) and I feel bad for them. Not from a higher point of condescension, I just feel bad for them period, because I imagine that their past must’ve sucked or something, and that they don’t like thinking about it. I’ve had shitty things (really shitty things, even) happen to me, but I value my past. This is my life, man, and I only get one (I think) and the shit that happened in it a long time ago, in my opinion, is just as important as the shit happening or the shit that will happen.
This nostalgia, however, despite all its glory, can be cripplingly sad. Because, of course, when the present isn’t going the way I want it, or any time I’m even remotely miserable, I look back on the past, and feel conflicted; it makes me happy to remember it so vividly but it also makes me sad that it’ll never happen again. This isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate the present when it’s good. And I certainly work on the future more than enough and look forward to it when it seems good. But it’s all important.
And that’s kind of why I like the philosophy that suggests that time is completely imagined and that all points in “time” are occurring simultaneously and we just don’t know it. That’s what I’m going to believe from now on. And whenever I hear a really good song it’s like I get to poke my head through some fold in the universe and take a good, long look at my history.
It’s 5:28 AM, so if this doesn’t make sense, I blame sleep deprivation. And now I leave you with one of my favorite lines in a song (“Hummingbird” by Wilco).
Remember to remember me
standing still in your past
floating fast like a hummingbird
