30 Day Song Challenge: Day 7 (A Song That Reminds You of a Certain Event)

A week has gone by now, and there’s been a lot of talk of the past and of memories and the soundtrack to my halcyon days, but there’s good news: day 7 is the end of the first act. This will be the last of my teenage reminiscences and the big finale of my melancholy musings on the past. I’m asked for a song that reminds me of a certain event, and the song that I’ve chosen is another one of those wildly evocative sense-memories, one of those transporter songs that bring me right back to a place, a time and a conversation that hasn’t really ended.

Needless to say, I’m not Jamaican, I’m not black and I’m not descended from slaves, so this song’s message has no real personal connection to me. I do like it: it’s heartfelt, it’s emotional and it’s a powerful plea for individualism (not the Ayn Rand kind, fortunately, but the more egalitarian version). It’s about rising from your own shackles and standing tall and proud and not letting The Man bring you down. This is something I can get behind.

But, unusually for me, it’s not what the song says that makes it so important to me. It’s where I first heard it that gives it its impact. This, to me, is the soundtrack to a certain pizzeria back home that became a regular hangout for the cast and crew of a production of Romeo and Juliet I had the privilege of working on. This pizza place had a jukebox which we would regularly abuse. We had a playlist: a usual rotation of songs and Redemption Song was always the first to be played.

I’m not sure if it meant all that much to any of us, but it didn’t matter at the time. We each had one song that we’d like to listen to there, and we each got ours heard. That play was an interesting and strange time in my life. I made many friends, some of whom have gone on to become my closest, and wasted so many evenings leaning over tables piled with empty, greasy pizza boxes arguing points and cracking jokes.

People talk of an adolescent awakening, and this was mine. It became one of those clichés about broadening your mind and discovering the world around you and all that other hippie bullshit, but there’s a grain of truth in all that. I did broaden my mind, and I did discover a great many things unknown to me until then, and I had a blast doing it. I met characters, unusual people who danced in PVC trousers and top hats, people who threw themselves through drywalls and people who could bend your ear for hours about absolutely nothing. I discovered music, investigated bars, and tried out as many new things as I could. I crammed as much exploration into, and squeezed as much experience out of, this brief period as was possible.

And yet, in everything I did, my fondest memories still reside in that small, unassuming mid-terrace pizza restaurant, and in its jukebox, the chrome-and-neon treasure chest that hung from the wall next to the Coke machine. The song is both mournful and triumphant, and so are my recollections. I mourn the loss of those times, but revel in the fact that they happened in the first place.

That pizzeria is long since closed, and a new group of overacting, loudmouth kids now inhabit the stage we once brought to life. Some of those characters have lost contact, while others remain as family. Those times have gone, but they are not forgotten: nothing is forgotten, especially not the laughter and the experiences and my unfortunate teenage goth phase. While Redemption Song may not have any significant and lasting political impact upon me, it’s affected me deeply emotionally, if only by being the opening theme to friendship, conversation, and the rest of my life.

30 Day Song Challenge: Day 6 (A Song That Reminds You of Somewhere)

And so Day 5’s story brings me nicely onto Day 6’s song. It was that same summer in London, and those few weeks are still evoked by this track. It popped into my head one day in a Tube station, when I saw a signpost telling me which platform was for northbound trains, and which was for southbound.

No matter where I am, if see the word “southbound” this song still jumps in front of my mind, and I’m instantly transported back to that sultry summer and the ceramic furnace of the London Underground in a heatwave. It’s one of those oddly Proustian sense-memories: even the opening riff can bring back the stench of summer sweat, the robotic applause of trains clattering in tunnels below, the crush of bodies searching for something to hold on to as they’re jostled about their daily lives, and the feeling that I was outside of all this: nowhere to commute to, no badly airconditioned office to melt in, no real reason to be on those trains except to feel outside of it all from within the centre.

Those days were carefree: the paragon of teenagehood. I’d finished school, got accepted to the college course of my dreams, and had nothing to do except wait out the long, humid months until I was thrust forward into the second act of my life. I spent that summer doing as little as I could: ecstatic finally to be free of the constricting confines of secondary education and percolating with anticipation of the good times ahead. I was arrogant, cocksure and confident: all the things an eighteen-year-old should be, and I was convinced I had the best taste in music of anyone who had ever hummed a tune.

This is largely Thin Lizzy’s fault. They were a huge part of my teenage years, symbolic to me now of my musical awakening: that moment when you realise that there’s a world full of music out there waiting for you to listen to it. Thin Lizzy were a gateway band for me. From them, I found my way into the rest of the 1970s, and all the hard-rocking stadium-fillers therein. Lizzy led me like Virgil led Dante, through the circles of rock. They showed me Led Zeppelin raising their arms to touch the gods; Jimi Hendrix burning his guitar in sacrifice to the solo; The Rolling Stones seducing everyone in sight; Lynyrd Skynyrd soaring through the skies; Rory Gallagher playing the back room of a dingy pub full of thousands of people.

Nothing could have prepared me for what lay ahead: it was no less than a musical odyssey, a devouring of every song that I could lay my hands on, the excitement at finding a new band even if everyone else on the planet had heard them before. I spent countless hours attached by the ears to my stereo, countless nights in dark basements watching people sweat over their guitars, countless CDs and records and downloads cataloguing my experiments, countless lyrics and melodies and rhythms running around my brain. Thin Lizzy had no idea what they’d started.

Maybe this song doesn’t exactly fit the criteria of today’s 30 Day Song Challenge. It does remind me of a place, but more than that it reminds me of an entire era encapsulated in those humid, crowded subway stations. It wasn’t this song in particular that started all this, but Southbound is the icon, the synecdoche, the part that represents the whole of my musical education. From the moment it first forced its way through my mind on the London Underground all those years ago, it’s been southbound for me ever since.

30 Day Song Challenge: Day 5 (A Song That Reminds You of Someone)

I've never really been one for connecting specific people with specific songs (not emotionally, at least), because to be honest I think it can ruin a perfectly good song if the relationship goes south. Having said that, there is one song that reminds me of a specific person, and though it may seem a little clichéed at first, bear with me, because my reasoning behind it may surprise you.

I suppose I should get a little background out of the way first. This song reminds me not so much of a person as of my reaction to the situation we found ourselves in. I must have been 17 or 18, hanging out in London in the summer, nothing much to do except ride the Tube up and down and sit on the South Bank smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee and reading cheap paperbacks, probably thinking I was the coolest motherfucker on the planet, not really realising that coffee and paperbacks are the backbone of any city's economy.

But I digress. At this time in my life, I was relatively new to Nick Cave, and still in that giddy stage of exploring every song in a newfound artist's back catalogue. I first came across this song as a mid-album track on a greatest hits collection, and largely dismissed it as a run-of-the-mill heartbreak song of a kind I'd heard before. I was far more interested in Cave's angry murder ballads and screamy Biblical armageddons.

That was, of course, before I met the person who became my first boyfriend (that's too strong a term, really, but it'll suffice). We had a brief but tumultuous dalliance that summer, and tried to maintain over long-distance, but in the end it just fizzled out. It wasn't acrimonious, nor was it particularly friendly; it simply ceased to be.

It was then that I heard this song again, but this time I paid attention. I listened to the lyrics, I felt the music and the sadness in Cave's voice. I could hear the heartache almost palpably being squeezed from Cave's guts as he squirmed under a magnifying glass of his own making. I listened to him talk about stars exploding in the sky and the world going to war and all those other marvellously morbid images that only Cave can conjure out of love.

I listened to the song, I listened to Cave and I listened to my own heartache. And here's why I'll always remember this song: it did nothing. For all intents and purposes, this song should have had me crying until I puked. But it didn't. I didn't feel anything, and it surprised me. Now, it's got nothing to do with the song: the song is beautiful and elegiac and makes you catch your breath with every image in Cave's lyrical acrobatics. It's got to do with me. I discovered that I couldn't muster that depth of feeling inside myself for the loss of something that had meant so much to me, if only for a short time.

So I listened, and I listened, and I listened some more. I wore out the CD and if I could have worn out my iPod, I would have. I tried to figure out just what this song was telling me. It was having an effect on me, certainly, I just wasn't sure what.

Then, finally, it hit me. I'd been listening to too many sad songs, watching too many movies. Emotions aren't as big or as dramatic as they're often portrayed. Sometimes you can let something go and it's OK. Not everything has to be a big deal, not every relationship has to be the one you invest everything in, and not every emotion has to be felt to its fullest depth: we can get by with a twinge of sadness and a shade of nostalgia, and move on. We don't have to live every day like we're a Nick Cave song.

So I'd figured it out. I wasn't some heartless monster: I was a human being after all. A human being who had maybe been mistaken as to how important something (or indeed someone) was. I'd realised why the song didn't have the impact I thought it should have had on me. I was eighteen years old, getting my first taste of real human relationships. This was just the first act, the pilot episode. I had a whole story left to unfold before me, and I had no idea where it was going to go. I'd have to leave a lot of things behind me on the way, but I knew then that not all of them would be as important as others. I knew then that not everyone would be the one I've been waiting for.

30 Day Song Challenge: Day 4 (A Song That Makes You Sad)

The fourth day caused me a lot of trouble, more than the previous days, but I think in the end my choice of a song that makes me sad complements yesterday’s choice almost perfectly. It’s a song I haven’t listened to in a few years, and hearing it again brought back a rush of memories and feelings associated with it, and it suddenly seems even more relevant to me now, all these years later.

In My Life is the other side of the coin to Thunder Road. It’s an elegy to everything you leave behind in your life, a nostalgic reflection on places and people of the past, of shared time and wasted time and all the wonderful things that go with youth.

This is a song about growing up, which is something I’ve recently ventured into. Having spent almost 5 years on the other side of the country, I often reflect on my hometown, and the years I spent there. Simpler times, and maybe happier. This song reminds me of my teenagehood at home for two reasons: first, I listened to it a lot back then just because I thought it was a nice song, and second because listening to it now I realise what The Beatles are really saying in it: time goes by and all you’re left with are memories.

But the real reason this song makes me sad is that simple and inescapable fact that things change. I can never get back that time in my life, never relive those memories. A melancholic sense of nostalgia pervades this song, a nostalgia for things that no longer remain. “Some have changed: some forever, not for better,” they sing, and they’re right. On returning home, every time I notice something has changed, something has gone, something that became a cherished memory for me now exists only as that. A favourite bar, a pizzeria, even the people have changed.

There is a great sorrow in leaving things behind. Sometimes all you want is to get out and explore, but you never really realise how much you take the present for granted. We all plan for the future, we all have hopes and dreams, and we sometimes forget to stop and look around and savour what we have right now, because we don’t think that someday in the bright and shining future we’ve got laid out for ourselves, what is now the present will invariably become the past, and will end up as nothing more than images and songs and snatches of emotion.

There are things that are beyond all our control, and the one that’s always on the front of people’s minds is getting older and saying goodbye. In My Life is---beyond all other things---a farewell to the past, to youth and to all those places and people we’ll never get back. But it’s not all bad in the end, really, because no matter how much things change, they’ll always remain in my memories, and in my life I’ve loved them all.