Filed Away For Recollection

Flipping on the radio, you hear the first few notes of Here Comes the Sun by The Beatles. You recognize it immediately. A smile spreads across your face. Your mind is sent reeling back through time. You can remember the first time you heard the song. You remember how it felt when George Harrison belted out "And I say... it's alright." You remember who you were at the time. Whether you were six, 12, or 19, you remember how it felt. How it felt to live the past 30 years of your life with this song. You can't believe there were years of your life when this song wasn't part of your "musical motif." Who was I before I heard this song? Who was I after I heard this song? What does this song mean to me?

Your thoughts dig deeper. You don't just remember the first time, but you remember fragments of other memories. Other memories attached to the song. Other emotions start to flood your mind. You remember how you use to close your eyes and listen to this song in junior high school. You remember how your alarm clock was set to wake you in the morning to this song during your second year of college. You remember how it was one of the songs played at your wedding. You remember playing it for your nephew for the first time, while providing him with a thorough and illuminating history of the band who performed it.

Just as we remember the moments or events associated with the song, we also feel the emotions attached to these moments. You don't simply remember that you use to close your eyes in junior high, but rather you remember how you felt so very alone and like an outcast. Or during college, you remember that it was your first college boyfriend who suggested setting the alarm to this song and how at the time you thought you'd spend the rest of your life waking to this song. Songs that become part of your "musical motif" typically stay with us throughout our lives. We can remember not only the first time we heard the song, but also an accumulation of memories that span our lifetime. These songs stay with us and we continue to form new memories and attachments. Even a song that we currently have memories attached with may continue to meld and change in our last remaining years.

The song ends, and all in the time frame of a couple of minutes, you have flipped through these musical memories, like sifting through old papers and photographs in a shoebox. Why is it that certain songs send you sifting through these memories? Filed away for recollection, we pull them up. We review. Every note and every lyric reminds you of a particular time or place. What do you hear? What do you remember? Where do you travel to in your mind?

(excerpted from work in progress)