Recapturing the Past Through Music

The other day I was driving to work and playing my old iPod over the radio when Franz Ferdinand's "Lucid Dreams" began playing. A few times throughout the song, the feeling of sitting on a loud, creaky school bus that was merging onto the 5 Freeway on its way to a high school cross country meet flitted through my mind. It's a hard feeling to describe; the experience of just heading out to a meet seemed to very briefly supersede the experience of driving to work. The last time I was on a bus heading to a cross country meet would have been close to two years ago, but the post-punk revival sounds of Franz Ferdinand somehow brought the long-gone feeling rushing back into me, if only for a brief moment or two: leaning against the window, hearing kids yelling and squirming, sipping from a refilled water bottle as I contemplate the competition, the bus's engine straining as it tops Hamburger Hill.

It seems like most of the Franz Ferdinand songs I have have this effect. I think it's because I was really into their music around sophomore year of high school and would probably listen to it often on bus rides to cross country meets. For some reason, though, of all the times I've listened to one of their songs or another, the moment that many of their songs capture for me is a bus ride to a cross country meet. Music seems to have this amazing property of clinging onto not just the visuals of a time when you happen to hear it, but the feeling of being where you were as well.

It's interesting because the reason behind what feeling or experience gets captured is not always obvious. When I hear MGMT's "Kids," for example, I think of a summer running camp in Big Bear a few years back where I first heard it. It makes sense that I go back to the nighttime outdoors of Pine Summit when I listen to that neo-psychedelic beat or the relevant scene in Yellow Submarine when I hear "Eleanor Rigby."  But the only reason I can think of that makes me recall part of a typical bus ride to a cross country meet when I hear, say, "40 Ft," is that I happened to be really into Franz Ferdinand's music at the time. Similarly, when I hear Far East Movement's "Like a G6" I go back to sitting outside a local Starbucks with some friends before heading to class. I think it must have been at the height of the song's popularity, but I don't remember being that into the song at the time.

The uniqueness of different songs, I think, is what could primarily allow them to sometimes so vividly recapture an experience or feeling we've had. Sure songs can sound similar, but the lyrics, vocals, beat, and various instruments and how they're played combine for an enormous assortment of different tunes. Nothing else sounds like "Like a G6" so it was able to attach something completely unique to an otherwise routine, unremarkable Starbucks visit and allow me to recall the experience of sitting outside the coffeehouse early that morning. It shows how incredibly complex the human mind is as it can take a three or four minute piece of multifaceted sound and associate it with any sort of loosely connected experience or feeling to the point of momentarily reliving it.

With memories often being made up of only flashes of images and sounds that can be diluted and even altered, recapturing the past through music, a cultural love affair thousands of years in the making, is a nice way to relive a feeling or experience, mundane or extraordinary, for even a moment. Cross country meets were some of the best times of my high school career and genuinely feeling the experience of heading out to them (even if it wasn't nearly as fun as arriving and racing) is pretty neat. So next time you're out having the time of your life and wish there was a way to download parts of it onto a device, maybe play a favorite song that has yet to establish any significance.