Close Your Eyes and Listen
Scientists haven’t figured out teleportation yet, but music may be the next best thing.
It was cold and dark. I was a little bit lost and a little bit lonely. I’d ventured out, earbuds in, from my Chicago loop hotel searching for a slice of deep dish.
There was something magical about wandering those near-empty streets alone, eyes moving back and forth from the Google map on my screen to the wonder of skyscrapers and city lights. I looked in as students browsed the shelves and sipped coffee in a bookstore on the campus of DePaul, a bustling sign of life.
I eventually found a little pub, Exchequer, and my way back to the hotel.
This all happened six years ago. It happened again this morning. It happens every time I listen to Boxer by The National. The lights and loneliness fade into my mind in time with the melancholy piano notes of “Fake Empire.”
Scientists haven’t figured out teleportation yet, but music may be the next best thing.
Play me a song I love and I can probably tell you about the place I remember hearing it, or really paying attention to it, for the first time.
U2’s “Beautiful Day” takes me straight to I-85 North in Duluth, Georgia. I’m just starting my commute home from working customer support at a retail startup. The sun is shining and I’ve got the windows down. It sounds like freedom.
Why Should the Fire Die? by Nickel Creek isn’t the Appalachian foothills. It’s the red and gold rocky desert surrounding Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s jagged hills opposite perfectly manicured suburban lawns, seen through the windows of a rented Chevy Malibu.
The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done” is set in the living room of a high school friend's parents, at Christmastime, where I taught my two-year-old to sing the gospel choir chorus.
Music doesn’t just connect us to our own memories, though. It connects us to other people. I wanted to explore that connection, so I asked a handful of friends to share their own stories of geographically-tuned songs.
I heard stories about train rides across New Brunswick, road trips to DC and spring nights spent reading by lamplight.
Some of the memories were simple and nostalgic, but striking. My friend Kathy has traveled the globe, but whenever she hears “Walking on a Dream” by Empire of the Sun, she's in her Austin condo watching her husband dance with their newborn son.
Hearing from her, I thought of when my own daughters were young and how I'd sing as I rocked them to sleep. Those are memories that will last a lifetime; sometimes they just need a trigger to bring them to the surface.
I found that just as I'd hoped, my experiences weren't unique. Music was carrying these friends across space and time in the same ways. It was also packing an emotional punch. Some of their memories held fistfuls of joy.
Take my friend Josh, who's got more wanderlust than anyone I know. “Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World,” drops him out on Fontana Lake, in North Carolina, where he took a canoe camping trip with his dad at 16. He spent the second night in a flooded sleeping bag, watching his father float around their flooded tent on a thermarest.
They broke camp early the next morning, the rain still pouring, and paddled out to the middle of the lake. The misery of that rain-soaked night melted away as they watched the sun rise over the water in spectacular fashion.
Mary, a gospel singer, hears early Radiohead and experiences her first taste of freedom all over again. She's back at a dive record store in St. Louis — a little bit like Championship Vinyl from High Fidelity — surrounded by an ocean of tapes and CDs and records. Finally able to buy music without her parents’ supervision, she picks up OK Computer and it changes her life.
Dire Straits sets Phillip free from himself. He’s in the library of an old New England mansion on the night he found his dancing feet. The problem wasn’t the “body-hating, dance-averse fundamentalist Christian teaching” he grew up with, he assured me. He just wasn’t comfortable in his own skin — a trait he shared with his mentor Ted, who invited him to a New Year’s Eve party there.
Hearing the long introduction of “Money for Nothing," Phillip sees Ted “dancing quite terribly, as if he were on a broken pogo stick.” Ninety seconds later, just as the guitar solo kicks in, Phillip is on the floor too, relishing the temporary release from his insecurities.
Music sometimes takes people to dark places, too, with a right hook of heartache.
Tessa becomes a 14-year-old boarding school student in Connecticut again when she hears Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight.” Only she isn't at school. She's in a package store, buying the vodka she and her friends would drink and puke up all before making curfew.
Just as she walks in, she hears the song and sees herself in a mirror. She's a little shocked at her own reflection, at seeing herself "basted in makeup,” wearing her mother’s suede skirt and sporting big, 80s hair.
She described it poignantly, “I felt world weary and exhausted — way too young to feel so old. I wanted to collapse on the floor and go home, except I didn’t really have a home to go back to.”
Hearing the song now sends her back to that place and that feeling of being homesick for a home that wasn’t there. Still, Tessa said she’s “kind of grateful that Phil Collins was around to match the melodrama of an emo teenage girl.”
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