Music Memory

I’ve mentioned before that I associate certain songs with specific people. Sometimes the association fades enough that it’s just the song, again, with a faint undertone of memory, and sometimes not.

There are a few songs I association with relationships disintegrating and much as I once loved them, I can’t listen to them any more. It’s frustrating. Because I remember loving them lyrically, loving the musicality of them.

Then there are songs like “Feed the Tree” by Belly. It reminds me of a friend from college, who I still talk to. If you asked me to pick a “best” friend who knows the most about me, I’d hesitate a lot, but I’d be able to narrow down the list to about 5 people that aren’t family. He’s one of the 5 and he’s probably known me the longest, in some ways. Definitely the longest of the ones who have met me in person and that we still talk to on a regular basis.

Lately, we talk about life things. But back when he introduced me to Belly, we talked about music in addition to computer stuff and relationship stuff. That made me realize I could probably create a short playlist based just on those years. There would be Belly (and of course Tanya Donelly as an offshoot), Sarah McLachlan, The Cure, The Darling Buds, Anything Box, and probably some others as I dug through my CDs and actually remembered, each song inevitably leading to another memory. Driving to a town 30 minutes away, just so we could go to a specific music store, grabbing Taco Bell on the way home. Playing music at one end of campus while typing emails back and forth, almost fast enough to be a chat, to his end of campus where he was finding the next cd or deck to cue up. He put time in at the college station, because of his major. Meeting between classes at the arcade to mostly watch each other play Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter. Or just grab a snack and talk.

It’s not quite a college sound track, because other people I hung out with had their own sound tracks. Other parts of my life then had other sound tracks, some of which involve break up tracks I can’t listen to. (Although, sometimes, I wonder about my own taste… Dokken? Ah well.)

It’s interesting to think about, and almost makes me wish I had the time I did then… to make playlists, burn them to CD (well, back then it was cassette, of course) and hand them over to the person you’d made it for.

Guess that’s what DropBox and such is for, today.