I’m in the car with my niece, and we’re listening to one of my playlists. It’s a song from the late 1970s, Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, and she sings along to the words, which edge from slow to fast, from somewhat reflective to belted out, all the way to the plaintive last line. She stops, suddenly, and says, “This is kind of pathetic, that I know all the words to songs from my parents’ generation!” Our musical memory is inextricably associated with the context(s) of our lives, the people who come and go at different points, the places we are in when we listen to something or the mood that specific songs and tunes link us to. Even after the incidents that gave rise to those moods are long forgotten, the sense of feeling lingers, and comes alive each time we encounter the tune. If my young companion’s parents listened to Led Zeppelin when they were dropping her off to school every morning, the song gets imprinted in her mind in a way that is difficult to erase. It probably gets
making sense of the everyday