Associate a Song with a Memory!

Cafe Society
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… then share the details!

For my second trick (read: second thread), I figure I’ll throw out a game I play all the time with both new and old friends. It’s simple… describe a memory you have that’s intricately associated with a song. I find music is a lot like a smell; hear the opening chords of the right tune and you’re snapped right back in time.

If you can find the song (or music video) on something like Youtube, maybe share a link so the rest of us can hear something new!

I’ll start us off:

Song: Elephant Gun by Beirut. The video is terrible IMHO, but the song is phenomenal. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-mqhkuOF7s

Memory: This song describes a perfect week spent just before Christmas 2008, when I was at a really, really low time in my life. I’d been studying in Beijing for 4 months at this time and the distance had finally eroded a 4 year relationship with a girl I really and truly loved. Turns out that being thousands of kilometers away doesn’t make old fights go away.

One night though, I met a girl. A Danish girl. She was smart, pretty, funny and full of all kinds of other attractive stereotypes. She even came complete with an alluring accent! Her introduction to me was a breathless ‘hello’ when salsa dancing, followed by spending that night at an all-hours bar drinking, laughing, smoking sheesha and listening to music on her Ipod.

This was the first song she showed me and every time I hear that delicate strumming that opens the tune, I’m teleported right back into her room. In a mere 6 days, she cured my insomnia, loneliness, and depression while showing me that I was fully capable of being both attracted to someone else as well as attractive to them in turn.

As is always the case of the international student, she left 3 days before Christmas. Everyone’s heard ‘parting is such sweet, sweet sorrow’. Everyone who’s read a bit of Shakespeare or listened to a pretentious English major wax poetic about life and love, that is. We still talk, though not as often as we did immediately after her leaving. Apparently, she’s just like me in that this song either brings a Cheshire grin to her face or tears to her eyes.
Annnnyhow. Enough about my uninteresting life.

Any takers?

  • Budista
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The song: Cool Jerk as performed by the Capitols. It was playing on the radio of the cop car the first time I was ever cuffed and stuffed. Trumped up charges of course and I was later released.

Every time I hear that song I think of that night.

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Good thread, Budista! I have always been interested in how powerfully our senses of smell, taste and hearing are linked to memories. Here is one of mine.

I was a senior in high school, top-of-the-world, driving around with my pals in my dad’s car with the windows rolled down and the radio as loud as it would go. Smoking cigarettes during the day and doobies after dark, or vice versa. We were a smart bunch – we’d already developed some cynicism and doubt, but we were 18 and hopeful and invincible. We loved us some “serious” music, but when this song came on the radio, we sang along with glee and without irony. I cannot ever hear this almost-bubblegum song without being transported to that time and place.

Praying I coded correctly . . .

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Lots of songs transport me back but the first that came to mind wasNights in white satin, it was the summer of '72 driving my 65 Pontiac Tempest (cost me $50.00) on Boston Post Rd in The Bronx. It was a late summer night and no one else was on the road.
Strange the little things you remember

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“Riders On The Storm” and “Layla” associated with a family vacation to Los Angeles from Indiana. I was about 15, had my learners permit, and got my first non-drivers ed miles driving through the deserts of New Mexico , Arizona and California.

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“My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic. I had just begun to date my first serious girlfriend and she must have dragged me to that movie three or four times (that’s 9-12 hours of Leo DiCaprio). That relationship lasted a long time, through junior high, high school, and some college, before ending several years ago. I can’t say that I have great memories when I hear this song, but it does bring back thoughts of a simpler time for me when all I was expected to do was go to school and be home by midnight on the weekends.

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Green Day’s “Time of Your Life.”

Whenever I hear this song I almost have to stop whatever I’m doing because the wave of nostalgia is so strong. I immediately have these flashbacks to my MA year and the friends I made there, of sitting around with them drinking and griping about our studies, of all the great and small drama we went through, of graduation day in our caps and gowns. So far it was the best year of my life, and that silly Green Day song just makes my heart twinge with the memories whenever I hear it.

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Riding back from a Boy Scout campout in a 1966 Olds VistaCruiser I broke down two of the harmony parts of The Association’s Cherish and recreated them simultaneously in my head. This led to me visualizing, if only for a moment, multidimensional arrays. Which I thought was cool until someone here described a perfectly boring way to do it, which drove the cool one out of my head. :mad:

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Not a specific song, but big band jazz always brings memories of rolling seas, sailor’s cries and a peg-leg thumping across deck to me that aren’t really mine – for some reason, big band jazz was almost exclusively what I listened to when I first read Moby Dick, it was a cassette giving to me by my trumpet teacher.

When I hear the Talking Heads’ Road to Nowhere, I think of driving with my sister, because that’s actually what came on when she just had gotten her license and took her little brother out on a spin.

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There are so many songs that I immediately associate with books and, as you describe, the connection isn’t always sensible.

Lunatic Fringe brings memories of a kids sci-fi book about an alien named GLR and a man who had his skeleton replaced with metal. More importantly, it reminds me of my best friend in fifth grade who recommended the book.

Anything from Blizzard of Ozz reminds me of the book Shadowland by Peter Straub and my best friend’s girlfriend who gave me that book and so much more.

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One gorgeous autumn afternoon I was returning to my office from a meeting via a back roads route. There was no one else on the road. My car windows were open and the radio was on. The road gently curved and sloped and tree branches were reaching out to arch over it. Jessica started playing. I was perfectly happy.

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I have a few:

Whenever I hear Space Oddityby David Bowie I remember the group of friends I used to hang out with in college. We used to hang out at a tiny, derelict pizza joint that had this song on the jukebox, and the song always takes me back to sitting around having pizza with those friends and watching them drink beer - I would always have a glass of wine instead because I hate beer. We always clapped or banged on the table when the part with the handclaps played. Whenever I hear it I always stop and sing along, if I can.

I believe I mentioned, last time we had this thread, Soft Cell’s version of “Tainted Love.” It was playing on the operating room radio as I was delivering my daughter. I had a C-section and was awake for the whole thing, and nervous as hell. Fortunately my ex was there, holding my hand and listening to my drug-addled ramblings while our daughter was delivered. (No YouTube link, as I couldn’t find the version I like with no “Where Did Our Love Go?” at the end.)

Me Gustas Tuby Manu Chao will always remind me of a day when my brother picked me up from work, and he was listening to a mix CD that included this song. The sun was setting as we drove, and the song just complimented the gorgeous sunset perfectly.

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I was just having this same conversation with my wife, because a certain song had come on the radio: “Take The Long Way Home”, by Supertramp.

That song, as well as “Sara” by Fleetwood Mac, were both in heavy rotation on the radio in early 1980, when I got a bad case of the flu, and was home from school for a week. I spent my days lying in my bed, feeling crummy, and listening to the radio. To this day, 30 years later, when I hear either of those songs, my mind immediately goes back to that “sick week”.

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Oh, yeah, and it complemented it as well. :smack:

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The first song that comes to mind is Yellow Bird. My dad used to whistle it when I was little. He had a way of trilling his whistle like a flute; a technique I never learned to do. I remember being about four or five years old, and dad whistling the tune while he was shaving.

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It’s the summer of 1989, I’m 15 and working at Dairy Queen. My boss is a sketchy, grabby pervert. The uniform is hot, itchy and polyester. I’m earning a fabulous $4 an hour. And this song is playing almost every hour on the radio…

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I could ever hear mention of Love and Rockets, or even by extension, Bauhaus with out shuddering. It’s not even a bad song, but I LOATHED it for a good 15 years…

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Wild Thing by the Troggs.

On my July birthday in 1966, I was at a beach resort and it was a wonderful week vacation - and the number one hit was Wild Thing. That flute solo in the middle of the song would blare from the juke box in the beach snack bar area and echo out onto the beach.

Whenever I hear that song, all I have to do is close my eyes and see myself as a kid, playing on the beach on that wonderful July summer vacation.

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When I was in the 9th grade in 1981, we had a unit in gym in which we had to form into groups and make up a dance routine. I hated gym and also the Mean Girls in my classes. So here I am with a bunch of Mean Girls, rehearsing a dance routine to Dan Fogelberg’s “Longer.” I was about as graceful as a pig on roller skates, but I slogged through.

The morning of the day we were supposed to perform our routine, I got my very first period ever. (I skipped a grade AND was a late bloomer. Yeah, junior high was loads of fun.)

I still like Dan Fogelberg, but damn do I hate hearing that song.

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-Every single Simon and Garfunkel song, ever, but particularly The Boxer. It used to be one of my favorite songs as a kid (still is!), and according to my mother I used to call it “the pshew song” :D. I suppose it doesn’t trigger just one memory in particular, but it does strike me as a song that was a large part of my childhood.

-A lot of songs by The Weavers do that for me too…when I was little, my mother would play music on our record player and sway to the music with me in her arms. I remember it because I enjoyed it quite a bit.

-Celtic Woman’s version of May it Be played when I learned that an online friend of mine from another board had passed away. I sat at my computer bawling for most of the night.

-Back in kindergarten, I watched the short film “The Snowman,” about a boy whose snowman comes to life and flies over the countryside. The song playing as the boy and the snowman fly is Walking in the Air. Over the years I’d think about the video, but as a vague memory. I thought that particular video would never actually resurface, since I thought it was something impossibly obscure. Then, when I was in England in Christmas 2004, I saw a show on TV featuring the top 100 Christmas specials. Most of them were ones I’d never heard of, but the 90th(?) one mentioned…was The Snowman! The kid who sang the song (Peter Auty) talked about being teased in school for singing it. It was very, very strange, because normally, my vague memories often stay vague. But now, suddenly, here it was, resurfacing again after a number of years. So, not only does “Walking in the Air” remind me of watching that video, but also of that trip to England.

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Billy Joel’s ‘Only the Good Die Young’.

It doesn’t matter where I am or what I’m doing, when I hear that song, I am instantly taken back to the summer of 1978. I am trail riding through the woods on my first horse, Star, with the usual group of girls from the barn where I was boarding- Annette on either Topper or Ajax, Carolyn on Billy, Linda on Thunder, Joan on Fudgie. I have my little transistor radio hanging on my saddle horn by the wrist strap.

For that time, while the song is playing, I am THERE. I can smell the pine trees, the leather, the good smell of horse. I can feel the sun on my shoulders, the motion of my beloved horse beneath me. I can hear the soft thud of hooves on dirt, keeping time with the music, my friends and I singing along loudly and out of tune.

For that moment I am back reliving the best summer of my life.

When the song ends… I am very meloncholy. It is over. It is never to be again. Those horses have all gone to wherever it is good horses go when they die, and my friends have all spilt up, moved on.

But once, long ago, it was mine.