in the past couple weeks i've read posts on a couple of blogs about certain smells bringing people back to very specific memories. i think music does that a lot too. i have a collection of soft music cds that i listen to when i go to bed at nite and every time i put on michelle tumes "listen" cd it takes me back to the oregon coast on sunny late spring afternoon. 2 friends and i headed down there while we were staying with one of them in salem. one of my friends bought the michelle tumes cd at an outlet shop on the coast and we listened to it as we drove along the road watching the waves crash on the beach next to us.
i also have a tape labeled "california mix". on it are all the songs that we heard 7000 on the radio the first time i ever went to california. me and 3 friends got bored one afternoon and we'd always joked about going to california for coffee (cuz people thought it was crazy that we drove 5 hours to portland, oregon for dinner-- more than once). we got in the car decided to drive to california (about 10-11 hrs to the northern border). my friends car didn't have a tape or cd player so the entire trip we heard the same songs over and over on every station from vancouver to sanfrancisco (18 hrs down there, drove around, got coffee, walked on the beach, drove over the golden gate bridge, 21 hrs home along the coastal hiway). even though i'm sick of all those songs the tape reminds me of the fun trip we had.
British singer/songwriter Joe Jackson stopped releasing video clips of his songs for a long while because he believed that they steal our memories.
ReplyDeleteHis belief was that we used to remember events from the past or certain periods in our lives when we heard certain songs. He said that video clips changed that. A lot of the time when we hear songs now instead of great memories we simply think of the video clip.