There’s a version of your favorite album that you’ll never get back. The version where you were hearing it for the first time, in some specific context you didn’t know you were recording.
A drive, a summer, a particular year of your life that hadn’t revealed itself as a particular year yet. Music doesn’t really live in the speakers. It lives in whatever was happening when you heard it.
I have songs that are permanently about people who have nothing to do with the song. The artist wrote it about something completely unrelated to my life and now it belongs to a Tuesday in 2011 and a person I no longer talk to and a drive I can still feel in my chest if the intro hits right. The song didn’t do that. I did. But I can’t undo it.
What’s strange is how involuntary it is. You don’t choose which songs get loaded with meaning. Some of them you played hundreds of times on purpose, deliberately, and they stayed clean. Others got ambushed — background noise at a party, something a stranger was playing, a TV show you half-watched — and now they’re wrecked in the best or worst way. The ones you tried to make meaningful rarely are. The ones you weren’t paying attention to got in anyway.
There’s probably something in there about how memory actually works — that it’s not about effort or intention but about emotional state, about what was open at the time. A song that catches you when you’re raw or young or in the middle of something gets written into you differently than one you approach deliberately as a music appreciator with opinions.
I wonder sometimes what songs are getting stamped right now, today, without my noticing. Something playing in the background while I’m distracted, while I’m in the middle of something I don’t yet know matters. In a few years it’ll come on somewhere and I’ll know exactly where I was and I won’t be able to explain it to anyone.
That’s the thing about music. It’s always taking notes.