Another Place and Time

I believe that the best songs transport you to another place and time.

Your destination upon listening might be the place and time in which you first heard the song. It might awaken what you were thinking, feeling, and experiencing upon first listen. In this sense the song is constantly an automatic time transport back to the first listen. It is an echo of a moment in which you may have seen and felt the world differently.

The song may just capture the feeling of a specific moment, hour, day, or year in your life. The melodies remind you of thoughts and emotions from that era. Maybe it’s a moment you’re nostalgic for. Maybe it’s someone you pined for. Maybe it’s an angry metal song that evokes teenage rebellion.

Today I listened to Helvetesfönster by Ghost and it brought me back to a day in high school. Suddenly I was on a science class field trip to Paramount Carowinds theme park with my classmates. Or was it Bush Gardens? I took trips to both in high school and now have difficulty distinguishing the specifics of each. It was more than twenty years ago. I have a strong memory, but memories do fade.

This was before cell phones and smart devices. It was a time when one only accessed the Internet via a slow dial-up connection, when companies didn’t track us via the gadgets in our pockets.

I was content to sit and stare at the passing wilderness that walled each side of the road. I thought about how there was something special in that moment, sitting and staring, surrounded by peers who also sat and stared. I thought that our youth would end before we knew it, that we’d all move on and many of us would forget about each other, that we’d vie for good jobs and social status, and that ultimately we’d lose what made us genuine, if we were ever genuine to begin with. We’d have families and become consumed by their relevance. We’d have money and be consumed by its investment potential. We’d become what Holden Caulfield called “phonies” if we weren’t phonies already. We’d be fully absorbed by the rush of it all. We’d never again just be glad to sit and stare.

Sitting in absolute silence while a song plays and watching trees whir by a window somehow made the modern world’s anxieties seem trivial.

One of my favorite songs, Like a Stone by Audioslave, played on that bus ride. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard the song, but the song was relatively new at the time. It seemed fitting to think about life while listening to a song about death. That was when we were capable of just listening to a song, when songs weren’t a means of multitasking or a drug for numbing our hatred of a moment pressing down on us.

Like a dream within a dream, I was listening to a song within a song, and it felt nice to return to a simpler time.

I wish to turn off the noise and just listen to a song again.