Music and Memory

I have amassed quite a database of music in my mind the 28, almost 29, years I've dwelled on this world. Thousands, tens of thousands of songs, including the bad ones I don't like or don't listen to recreationally. Church songs. Childhood singalong songs. My hip hop. My rock. My metal. My singer-songwriter stuff. My electronic. 

    Over the years I began to associate music with time periods of my life. If I hear a song, a flood of memories from the time period of when I was listening to it. This is nothing special. Lots of people have this trait. I remember the year many songs came out, even the ones that I wasn't even alive when they were popular. My memory is strongly correlated to music and sound. It always has been

       I went to this little gas station over by my new stomping grounds, and the radio plays a lot of adult contemporary on the speakers around the gas pumps. I heard a few songs I haven't heard in 20 years, not since I was a young boy. These 90's songs were always on the radio as I was going to my routine child psychiatric doctor's appointments in Billings in the late 90's and early 2000's. I remember the names of the FM radio stations I and my brothers and mom would listen to when we would go on trips to Billings or elsewhere in Montana.

       The instant I hear a song, I recall times and  places and circumstances I was in when I first heard that song or the periods of time where I would continue to listen to it. I remember the movies I heard songs in, the trips in cars with friends as we jammed to metal, rock, rap, and classic rock around my hometown.

I heard a quote once that said something along the lines of "art is how we illustrate space. Music is how we illustrate time."

If that is the case, my time on earth is quite illustrated, that's for sure.

      Even though my life has been troubled and difficult at times, one of the greatest blessings God has ever bestowed on me is good hearing, and with that my relishing and immerson in sound and music. My memory is based on sound and words, not so much imagery. I recall language, concepts, and ideas with relative ease, and many of these concepts and ideas I learned from music. Even my violent rap and brutal metal has taught me a great deal about existence.

     Christian music taught me the nature of God and how he operates. Eminem taught me what its like to love your children above all things even when society and the world is extremely brutal to you. He also taught me that even after all the spite he had for his mother and the viciousness that came with it he could still apologize and forgive even the darkest circumstances a child and family could be in.

        Metal taught me some darkness, and even some light, and some metal's brutality can only be matched by its sheer depth and complexity. A lot of people don't appreciate heavy and aggressive music as much as they should.

       Electronic music taught me the amazing new and diverse array of sounds technology can bring to music. If music illustrates time, the course of my life and the last hundred years of our species history is quite colorful, quite rich, and quite deeply illustrated with sound.