Sing, memory: Songs as mnemonic devices

Nevermind‘s 20th anniversary a few weeks ago led to as much Gen X nostalgia as I’ve seen in a while, but it didn’t feel overdone. If anything the real nostalgia was for moments when one album could signal a change in the order of things. People talked about or at least remembered where they were that fall in 1991 (and when they heard the hidden track).

Another album released around the start of the school year, but 18 years earlier in 1973, sets up my annual fall nostalgia trip: Van Morrison’s Hard Nose the Highway and the second to last track, “Autumn Song.” It’s eight minutes that sounds like the end of September and grounds the listener to this fleeting season.

It’s a trick — my way of forcing my brain to stay still for a bit and prevent me from being surprised when fall is over. Picking a single track to associate with a certain time or event is not uncommon — a wedding song for instance. But why people don’t do it more often for less significant moments?

Here’s a recipe if you want to:

1. Make sure it’s a relatively new track – at least to you.
2. Associate it with an event that has a chance of being somewhat memorable on its own: a vacation, a road trip, before a night out, after a road race.
3. Limit how often you might hear it after you try to associate it with the event, at least for a few months.

It will pop up on some playlist eventually and take you back. It happens to me with songs I’ve heard snowboarding:

1. My Morning Jacket’s “Golden” — Telluride, on the Lower See Forever trail; seeing the sun set through the aspens.
2. Mew’s “Behind the Drapes” — Blackcomb glacier, one big turn.
3. Ride’s “Vapour Trail” — Jay Peak, on Northway, with a vapor trail overhead “in a deep blue sky.”