music nostalgia

since i cleaned out my room and moved things around, i've been finding old things that i forgot i had - once well loved items that got pushed to the wayside as new things found their way into my life. i took the time to reorganize my cd collection - a strangely diverse group ranging from classical to punk, rock to indie stuff and so on. 2 cd's have resurfaced from this clean&move:


edie brickell & the new bohemians - shooting rubberbands at the stars: i actually had this on tape in high school and played. it. to. death by the time i graduated. so i mourned the loss, got in my old blue buick and went to brunswick, to bull moose music to get it on cd.

i can still sing every word to every song...even after years of not having heard it.




indigo girls - swamp ophelia: this was another tape that i have since replaced with disc. with "shooting rubberbands", it somehow snuck into a collection that was fraught with concrete blonde, ani difranco, the pixies, sleater kinney, L7, the beastie boys, mazie star, the violent femmes etc. etc. so on and so forth.

music has such a way of pulling you back to a certain place, a certain time in your life...a moment made crystal clear just by lyric or guitar lick. it has a way of reminding you of a person or an object, loved or hated, and suddenly those feelings fill you once more.

* cruising around with friends in the middle of a summer night with all the windows rolled down, blasting concrete blonde and howling at the moon.

* coming home late at night from work, sitting on the porch in the dark with stravinsky or vivaldi playing softly, stressed out and crying at how much i hated my job, how the money wasn't worth the long hours and my sanity.

*singing along with joni mitchell while baking in the kitchen of an old apartment in canada and being startled when i realized that the boyfriend i was living with was watching me the whole time - smiling, he told me how much he was in love with me.

the best part is that music can produce imagines and links to things for absolutely no reason! like nick drake's "northern sky" - it makes me think if alaska. alaska? um...okay. i've never been there, never seen it anywhere other than in pictures and on tv or movies, but hearing that song conjures up images of evergreens and snow pack, mist drifting through the trees and the scent of wood smoke. how weird is that? now i'm sure we could pick apart my brain and link alaska to the song a million ways from sunday, but i like blissful ignorance of not thinking too hard on it. northern sky = alaska. i'll keep it that way. simple.

any broad, seemingly unconnected jumps your brain makes between songs and real life? or is it just me?