30 Day Music Challenge: Day 5

‘A song that reminds you of someone’

There are so many of these, as I think I use music as a form of communication and association. I love making playlists for friends, the natural sequel of a youth making compilation tapes for friends or for long journeys. I could write about a hundred songs here, but I’m just going to choose a few.

‘Runaway Train’ by Soul Asylum reminds me of my husband. It was his favourite song when we met and I’m sure it’s still among his favourites, though he’s not as obsessive as I am about keeping lists and playlists and enumerations of these things. He’s someone who’s always busy, often in a rush, to the extent that we often have to make informal bookings to spend time together. Even if it’s just an hour to watch a TV programme or a DVD. You wouldn’t think you’d have to make a date to watch ‘Holby City’ or to go to Starbucks with someone you’ve lived with for 14 years, would you? Frustrating though this can be, perhaps it’s fun as well: perhaps it keeps a feeling of the start of a relationship, of not taking things for granted. Of not degenerating into some sort of interpersonal adjacency pair through routine and nothing else. Anyway: yes, ‘Runaway Train’. It’s quite a simple song in some ways, but who knows what it’s about? And maybe that’s the point. Is the train a metaphor? Is it one of those ‘journey of life’ things, which… well, which seems all the more apposite in the circumstances.

‘First of July’ by Foy Vance reminds me of anyone in my life with whom a friendship has ended. It’s a song about moving on and being okay despite being hurt, and it’s a beautifully simple song, redemptive in many ways. It reminds me of lots of different people in this respect: people who have moved on from me, people from whom I’ve moved on in turn. It’s a song about learning from a relationship that didn’t work, and moving on a stronger person after all. At the time it feels like the end of the world when the friendship ends… later, it almost always feels as though this ending was meant to be. And the redemptive chords of the song, and Foy Vance’s gorgeous voice, epitomise this for me.

A few songs remind me of a few friends - songs I know to be special to them. ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ by Van Morrison is the favourite song of one of my best friends… aptly, someone who has brown eyes, and I’m sure it’s a song which has been a soundtrack to crucial moments of her life, and so when I hear it I always think of her. Rewinding, like a cassette tape at speed, and aptly so as I’m going back beyond the era of iPods and CDs, ‘The Sound of Summer’ by The Adventures, ‘Little Lies’ by Fleetwood Mac and ‘Take On Me’ by Aha remind me of people from years ago… friends from sixth form, who were the source of daily chat and entertainment back then, and two of whom are just occasional email contacts now. One of them - the one I’m reminded of by The Adventures’ song - I’ve no idea what happened to him. I know he wanted to be a doctor. I hope that worked out, and that he’s happy somewhere. Those songs still evoke the nostalgia of the sixth form common room and the feeling of freedom just beyond the fingertips, as we all got ready to leave school. That mix of sadness and utter joy. I can still sense it when I hear those songs and hear, between their choruses, the ghostly laughter of much too long ago.

Newer friends have songs too: ‘Human’ by Nerina Pallot sums up one friend, someone who knows me better than they realise and better than most; ‘Just Like Honey’ by The Jesus and Mary Chain sums up another, because it’s a friendship which reminds me a bit of that strange, eerie link between the central characters of my favourite film, ‘Lost in Translation’, on whose soundtrack the song appears. And sometimes it can be malicious, can’t it? Someone like me… I can’t always do ‘nice’. The people I care about mean a lot to me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be a bit… critical. And that can happen through music too. Remember that song from the advert for the Renault Megane? ‘I see you baby - shaking an ass…’ - I’m not sure who it’s by, and what it’s proper title is, and frankly I can’t be bothered finding out as it’s not a song I like, but it’s ridiculous, quite ridiculous, just how much it always makes me think of a certain person on the edges of my life and how much she truly loves herself and how she… well. Enough, I think. Enough.

Songs are the links between melody and thoughts: lyrics thought-tracking a link between how we feel and how we can explain this to someone else. And so what could be more natural than that songs should be able to make us think of one another? Every song I hear makes me think of someone: someone I know, someone I don’t; the person who wrote it, or what’s going on in my life at the point of listening. When I was about 13, I drove myself to the borderlines of sanity for a while, wondering what it would be like if we could read each other’s minds. If people could see the gulf between what I say and what I think… the confused subversion behind the polite exterior. And of course, we can’t. Our thoughts, so long as we have the skill to hide them carefully, are like tortoises curled for hibernation inside the protective shell of the outward personas we create. But music, and books, and paintings change all this, and let us in to see inside one another’s outward shells. And once we do that, we find songs to sum each other up and songs for how we relate and understand and remember and get it wrong.

And it’s like an unending playlist of likes and dislikes and concords and dischords. And just occasionally it’s like a magic semaphore of words and notes, and then it feels worthwhile.