Music and the Places It Takes You
Smash Mouth’s Astro Lounge will always hold a special place in my heart. It was one of the first albums I actually went out and purchased with my own money. If I think about that album I don’t think about how bad the songs were. I don’t think about bleached hair or Jennifer Love Hewitt. Instead, I’m reminded of sitting at home somewhere in my middle school years, listening to the album through the disc drive on my family’s PC. I used to own these terrible headphones that were made out of rubber. They were like earbuds, except the ‘bud’ part was molded to the outline of my earlobes. They would wrap around the back and then somehow fit smugly into my ears. The sound had an awful, tinny quality to it. But I thought I looked really cool as I sat in my desk chair and sung along to ‘walking on the sun’.
To every person there are those songs where the song doesn’t matter at all. It’s about how that old music takes you back to a very specific time in your life. Good times or more often than not, the worst times. It’s one of the most personal and unique feelings in the world. You could be having dinner with a group of friends and hear something come on and be filled with an indescribable feeling of nostalgia while the others around you don’t think twice.
Putting on Boxcar Racer’s self-titled album takes me back to a summer love during my freshman year of high-school. I think everyone has that one summer with that one person that just makes them feel good when they think about it. I would sit with it playing on one of those tacky, gaudy boom-boxes that were all the rage back then while me and this girl would talk on the phone. For hours and hours every night we would talk, and unknown to her I would almost always have that album playing in the background. Sometimes it would switch to one of the other four discs that were in the CD-changer. Inevitably, however, I would always bring it back to Boxcar Racer It was a good time in my life, and that’s where that music takes me. If I hear that album now, even for a second, it really brightens my day. Not becuase of the music, but because of what I relate it to.
On the other hand, most of the time we wish that we didn’t relate that once great album to a long-lost love. Because after things go bad that music is ruined forever. Nobody ever realizes they relate those songs to that person until its too late.
If I close my eyes and listen to Alkaline Trio’s Good Morning I can see so clearly me and a girl sometime during my junior or senior year.. We’re lying in bed and we’re watching the dawn illuminate my room. That same gaudy boom-box is now playing ‘fatally yours’ and I can hear my parents moving around downstairs. At some point this girl had snuck over the night before. We had spent the night really just hanging out. We talked and joked and were somehow more thrilled because we were doing something we weren’t supposed to be doing. And now I would have to sneak her outside only to have her magically appear at my front door a few seconds later, ready to be given a ride to school. It’s a good memory tainted by life, and what happens later on. Because of that, to this day I have a difficult time making it through the opening tracks of that album. Instead, I find myself making excuses to put something else on. Nobody really knows why but me. All because of what I instinctively feel when I hear it.
Then there’s the music that makes you truly long for something. It doesn’t cheer you up or bring you down. What it does instead is fill you with regret knowing you took for granted something you couldn’t get back.
For about six months I lived in a run-down duplex with me and three friends. It was the lowest point in my life but something that I would give anything to go back to. It was a time where I was liberated and without fear because I’d reached rock bottom. I had nothing to lose because I knew that if I failed at something it really wouldn’t matter. I could not feel worse than how I already felt. What got me through it were the friends that lived in that duplex with me. If I felt terrible I always knew at least someone would be there. Night after night we would get drunk and insane. After about a month of this my place resembled something that looked like a large, two bedroom two bath garbage can.
My roommate and best friend, as his ring-tone he had The Draft’s ‘Lo Zee Rose’. I’m not sure if it was the entire song, or just the first few seconds, but I would constantly hear that familiar song about five times a night coming from his phone. This was a guy that saved my life. He was always there and made me realize that there were actually people that truly cared about me. To this day, when I hear that song I wish I could go back to that duplex and feel completely terrible. Not because it was fun, but because it put everything in my life in to perspective. The people I love are the ones that matter the most. More than a job, or money, or anything.
I was talking to a close friend recently and told her how Fleet Foxes’ ‘Helplessness Blues’ was ruined because of a failed relationship.
“What you need to do is take a trip and listen to that album while you make new memories. That way you can relate that music to something else”
I understand what she’s saying. But am I really willing to give up those summer loves, or dumpster duplexes? If I overwrite those memories with something else I’m afraid I’ll lose something forever that I'll never be able to get back. I’ll lose the places that music takes me.
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