When Music Finds the Memory

Why do memories flood my mind when I listen to a particular piece of music?

I had never owned — or even heard — anything by Cigarettes After Sex until recently. For reasons still unbeknownst to me, I picked up their album Cry. Soon after the needle touched the wax, something unexpected happened.

Memories of a seventeen-year-old kid — a boy who knew nothing about anything — began an invasion so powerful that before I even realized what was happening, I was in tears.

Perhaps I’m more emo than I realize.

I suppose 69¾ trips around the sun doesn’t necessarily mean we understand our emotions any better than we did after the first seventeen. Time adds years, not always clarity.

As I continue restocking my vinyl library, I find myself drawn to new music by bands I know nothing about. Something nudges me toward a record I’ve never heard before. I bring it home, lower the needle… and suddenly flashbacks from as far back as the ’60s begin playing in my mind.

Genre doesn’t seem to matter.

About an hour ago I listened to Cold Blood by Lydia Pense. Within seconds, I was back in high school in Louisville and Greensburg, Kentucky — moving to funk and blues I had never actually heard before. I still have no idea where that record came from. It’s odd how music sometimes finds me without an invitation.

The same thing happens with present-day artists.

The first time I heard Alyssa Hankey sing and play County Seat, I was transported to around 1973 — the year I quit school and eloped. I had promised my girlfriend I would quit and get a job if she would marry me. Neither of us had the slightest idea what we were doing.

But we did it anyway.

We drove across the Kentucky–Tennessee border with two of our best friends as witnesses to see a justice of the peace. I did have a license.

It was the love that wasn’t licensed.

Music has a way of unlocking rooms in the house of memory we didn’t even know were still there. A chord, a voice, a rhythm — and suddenly the past is not past at all. It is present, breathing, and sometimes weeping.

Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to both sound and image.

A photograph can freeze a moment.

A song can resurrect one.

And somewhere between the needle and the shutter, I keep discovering that the heart remembers more than the mind ever could.