How songs become portals to our past
My teen and I created playlists for each other. We discovered details about our lives, one song at a time.
I know we’re three years late, but we’ve been binge-watching Season one of Yellowjackets, two episodes at a time each evening this week. Woven into its Lost-meets-Lord of the Flies storyline are flashbacks dripped in 90s styling with a soundtrack that’s sending me straight back to my early twenties. I’m always shocked by how visceral my reaction is to certain songs. It’s like taking a sucker punch right to the gut; it physically aches to be suddenly thrown into the arms of nostalgia when I wasn’t expecting to be taken down that path.
When I hear Courtney Love’s snarling, almost whiny chorus of “Miss World” in episode one, I’m back in my bedroom in Olympia, WA. Shag carpeting the color of deep ocean waters, crystals arranged in a circle on a makeshift nightstand constructed of two crates covered with a tapestry, and copies of Riot Grrrl zines scattered on the floor. A few scenes later, PJ Harvey’s eerie vocals in “Down by the Water” drops me right into post-college 90s Portland. Watching that music video for the first time made me regret cutting my hair short after seeing Polly Jean move in that red satin dress, red lipstick applied with a heavy hand, and a cascade of luscious black curls swirling around her like snakes slithering in water.
I’m convinced that only music can spin you into an emotional web this deep. Songs are portals into our past. It’s both cozy memories kissed in fuzzy details and an aching in the heart for all the years that have traversed in between those memories and now.
There’s a theory behind that, you know, and apparently I’m at the age when I’m ripe for it. It’s called the reminiscence bump.
There are a few theories for why we show a reminiscence bump. One has to do with the way that so many of our experiences in our teens and twenties are formative – they become entwined in our developing sense of who we are – making them highly memorable.1
A few months ago, the kid and I made playlists for each other as a mutual parting gift after she left for college. It was a nod to mixed tapes, each list filled with 70+ songs that were meaningful to us at key points in our lives. I ordered mine chronologically and annotated each song on a Google doc, functional but nothing fancy. The kid one-upped me and put my designer self to shame by creating something beautiful in Canva. A real throwback to album liner notes, it was all dreamy teenage aesthetics with a mix of fonts and album thumbnails, punctuated with hearts, dotted lines, and digital facsimiles of patterned washi tape.
Coincidentally, we both took our time before we listened to each other’s playlists. I think we just had to be ready for it. We coordinated a weekend when we both had time to listen to the entire sequence of songs and it unfolded like a big reveal. All those years spent in her room during Covid lockdowns when she really started getting into music freshman year, and it was only now that I learned what her most heart wrenching 10th grade nostalgia song was. I shared mine, which was “Blasphemous Rumors” by Depeche Mode. I listened to it on repeat in my bedroom obsessively, rewinding that tape over and over until it got caught in the playheads in a long tangled mess.
This is how we shared new details about our lives. The song that gave her respite while writing endless college essays last year; the one that transports me to the back seat of a station wagon, watching rain drops slide down the car door window on the drive back from a middle school math league tournament. Go ahead and laugh, I always do. It’s easily the most Asian thing I could have shared with you about me—and I wasn’t even that exceptional at math. It amused my kid too.
The big surprise was the roughly 35% overlap in music, mostly from a few Kpop songs, The Cure, and 90s R&B. But the song I was most eager for her to hear, though I knew it wouldn’t speak to her musically at all, was the 7th song off of Pearl Jam’s Ten. January 2, 1992 and a one way plane ticket from NYC to Seattle, riding in a bus down the parkway in a state I’d never stepped foot in before with this song playing in my ear. I wonder what song will be her memory association of leaving home for the first time.
We learned so much about each other this way. Not through a conversation or with written words, but through music. It’s not that it’s impossible to evoke a memory and a mood any other way, but sometimes words and images fall short. It just doesn’t measure up to the way a song can tap directly into your emotions like tiny daggers to the heart. If you were to ask me if time travel was possible, I’d answer that it was. I can go back to my very first crush at age six when I was obsessed with the Jackson Five and tell you the layout of our first apartment in Queens, the exact shade of green tweed that was our couch, and how my grandmother smelled vaguely of garlic and Jean Naté splash.
I don’t quite understand the science of how the amygdala in our brain works. Such a tiny mass of neurons that process emotions so big, but I find myself looking up supplements I can take to make sure it’s healthy so it can keep imprinting memories. One of my greatest fears is that I’ll stop remembering and feel nothing. I can’t for the life of me remember names anymore, but the older I get, the more vivid those old memories are. I’m reminded of early milestones at every turn as I watch my kids live their college lives. I wouldn’t want to be a teenager or in my twenties again, especially not now, but sometimes I feel a wistful twinge for that naive youthfulness when the future feels wide open and brilliant before it gets dulled from the cynicism of age.
Because life right now is like living in two different realities. On one side I’m doomscrolling and feeling the absolute chaos that is our world. On the other, is the mundane details of everyday life as we try to process it all—and what I mean is, I don’t really know how to reconcile the two.
I scroll by a post on social media of someone who yells into the void, “how can you go about your daily lives when we’re in a constitutional crisis and everything’s being dismantled and secret war plans are being compromised!?” And it’s not the first time I’ve seen this question.
Everything feels terrible, I agree, but then I walk outside of my apartment and see kids playing soccer in the playground across the street, neighbors pulling up weeds around tree beds, and I stop to admire the yellow and purple crocuses that have bloomed overnight. I walk a few more blocks and duck into a hardware store to look for wall putty and at that point I’ve forgotten about the news I’ve just digested.
When I’m feeling the most anxious, I worry most for the kids who are already jaded by broken promises and collapsing systems even before they’ve had a chance to stick their heads in the clouds. Not that there isn’t a future anymore to fill big dreams with, but it’s harder to imagine when I compare my young adulthood to theirs.
The future is always uncertain, this I know, but I wasn’t prophesying climate disasters or a government dangerously toeing the line of oligarchy when I was a teenager. I didn’t have to choose between exercising free speech or risking deportation. Colleges weren’t battlegrounds with the government. I was fighting for my place in the world as an immigrant minority girl and pushing the goal posts forward, not watching it regress back.
I hope when my kids listen to songs from their youth, their music-triggered memories evoke the funny awkward moments of puberty and the pain of friendship breakups. Of all of their firsts and the occasional mind-blowing experiences. I hope they don’t ruminate about their young adulthoods as a time when the world made more sense. Because the world doesn’t really make much sense right now. I hope their future is better than that.
Related reading
Weekly links
To read:
Head in the Clouds – Following in Rachel Carson's footsteps and reading the language of the sky (Orion Magazine)
Rachel Carson is often considered the first woman environmentalist. Her evocative writing on clouds are accompanied here by the papercut artwork of Nikki McClure (and another shoutout to early 90s Olympia).I’m the Canadian who was detained by Ice for two weeks. It felt like I had been kidnapped (The Guardian)
If you aren’t familiar with this story, then take a read.An Artist Flowering in her Nineties (The New Yorker)
A sort of followup to last week’s newsletter. Isabella Ducrot is a 93 year old painter living in Rome who didn’t pick up a paintbrush until her 50s.The Chaos of NIH Cuts Has Left Early-Career Scientists Scrambling – As graduate programs lose spots and labs face shutdowns following Trump administration cuts to science funding, the path to a science career for students and researchers just got a whole lot harder. (Wired)
I’ve got two college science kids suddenly rethinking everything. Not a great time to be an environmental science major in particular.How to break free from your “toxic productivity” cycle (The Big Think)
Living a value-aligned life, not an achievement-aligned one. I really do feel like I’m finally free from this cycle. It only took a lifetime to get here.
To watch:
The commodified childhood – scenes from two sisters’ lives in the creator economy (aeon)
What are we doing to our kids? No, really, what? This disturbed me on so many levels.
To make and eat:
Greek Baked Eggplant With Tomato & Feta (Scrummy Lane)
Costco-sized packages of feta means finding all the ways we can use it besides throwing it in a salad and oh my, this savory recipes a hit.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/reminiscence-bump
I love the "emotional support goth." And the idea of trading playlists with your kid!
OMG “Blasphemous Rumors!!!” My friend was becoming a born again Christian in JHS and destroyed her Depeche Mode CD bc of that song.