Music as Sense Memory & Autobiography

*This was first published on my personal blog.

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I should start off by saying that clearly the other senses also elicit strong reminiscences of time and place throughout the backlog of our personal timelines. They're all innately tied together. I don't think one is more important than any other, only that we are wired (depending upon our lifelong interests) in favoring one over the others, who all end up playing roles. I don't have any interest in discussing the science of it, only in discussing the very real and tangible (to me) aspect of it.

But for me, music is the strongest one. I've played the violin, the bass guitar, become a DJ. I was the cliche of a child who made mixtapes from the radio, recording my favorite songs when they came on and hoping the DJ wouldn't cut off the end with their incessant and unnecessary ramblings. There was a radio show on the hard rock channel in Oklahoma City called "The Seventh Day." Every Sunday night, they'd play seven heavy rock or metal albums in their entirety over the course of the night. I don't remember if I was in the 7th or the 8th grade the night they played Tool's "Undertow" from start to finish, even including all the hidden tracks, through headphones so I didn't wake my brother as he slept in the bunk above mine.

I remember, when I was much younger, when we'd take family trips to the water park. The speakers would blast the mixed-genre station throughout the grounds and so you'd hear an uninterrupted broadcast all day long. I'd be annoyed by all the advertising now, but as a child and as a fan of music, it was great then. I remember believing fervently that "Pour Some Sugar on Me" was sung by Rod Stewart and not by Def Leppard, and got very excited about trying to win free tickets from the radio station for a future Rod Stewart concert. I never won, thankfully, but the water park and this particular musical fallacy are intimately linked together because that's where I first heard about the contest.

When I put on an Ella Fitzgerald record, I am transported back to my junior year of high school. I am in my girlfriend's bedroom. The smell of rosewater permeates everything. There is a haze of pink that coats that entire time period like a soft veil that's easily lifted.

Every time I put on the Digable Planets' debut album "Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space)," I am transported to a single four-day class trip to Washington, D.C. where I bought the tape (along with two others). But every time we rode the bus around town to our next tour destination, I had that tape playing in my headphones as I stared out the bus window. Even as politically engaged as I am as an adult, this is my stickiest memory of that trip - the album.

I can remember the shape of my room when I first heard A Tribe Called Quest's "Midnight Marauders" and "Do You Want More?!!!??!" from the Roots. I remember laying in bed at night having my mind blown by these new sounds. I remember the ceiling fan pushing cool air against me as I laid there and heard those albums for the first, third, and twentieth times. This was around the same time I had moved to Kansas, so I remember the smell of the new classrooms and my friend's basement bedroom where we listened to Hum and Weezer and Foo Fighters and Superdrag as we conspired to start our own musical invention.

And later, though the album of our high school band was recorded after I left the group, I remember helping craft many of those songs in our early days. So, every time I listen to that album, I am reminded of hot Kansas summers and the smell of the pizza place I worked in and the smell of taco bell in my car after a morning of practice and the taste of Natural Light at house parties we'd throw or attend. There is a special bit of nostalgia that comes with that because we MADE the music and I think that really adds a little sweetness to those memories. There was effort involved in solidifying those memories.

In college, I would be turned on to Jawbreaker and Sunny Day Real Estate and Strung Out and Propagandhi by my friend Steve. After late nights out, my friend John and I would fall asleep to the sounds of Fiona Apple's first album in a dimly lit dorm room and wake up well-rested the next day. I attach many of my college days to the music that was put in front of me because the people I surrounded myself with, and spent the most amount of time with, were also huge consumers of music. So this isn't at all surprising.

And then there are the nights that happened after I became a DJ. The crowded dance floors full of sweaty people giving absolutely zero fucks while losing themselves inside the measures of a few funky tracks or entire DJ sets or even dancing, oblivious, for an entire night. And these are sweet memories too because, while I didn't make the music, I was still in control of it. I manipulated the sound in such a way as to evoke certain bodily reactions and hopefully more than a few smiles along the way.

Now that I write more than I play out, I find that the playlists I create for each new body of work become inextricably linked to the books that I complete. There are artists and specific songs associated with my first book of stories. Same two with many of my uncompleted manuscripts and the ones I've finished and put out into the world (or am about to put out into the world). The ties that bind are strong and so I wonder what this profoundly weird time in world history will stick with me, musically. I wonder which artists and which albums will be my reminders 10 or 20 years from now.

It will also be interesting to see what kind of music comes out due to these strange days. I'm very much looking forward to that.

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