THE DAILY WRITE
How I Travel Through Time
What songs are in your favorite playlist? Why those in particular?
I grew up thinking that everyone could do this: make up a harmony track to any song you hear. As the youngest of six siblings, I found that harmony was my best bet if I ever wanted my voice to be heard.
Fast forward to my sixties. I’m still the girl who wants to be heard, and I’m still the one who can auto-harmonize to just about any song she hears. But now I’m all alone, driving in my car. Only the very best songs make it onto my driving playlist: upbeat, good harmonies, and great lyrics that compel me to sing along.
Other motorists, I may see along the way, may be completely unaware of two very important things. First: how great I sound — I sound AMAZING! And second: I may not be there in the car at all — I am GONE!
My car has become a time machine. The times and places to which I travel are all triggered by the songs in the playlist. For that reason, it has to be a random shuffle. The lack of predictability of the queue order is an essential element, or the triggering of the time travel will not work properly.
If all the conditions are right, I will be jumping back and forth over the time continuum of my own life.
Boz Scaggs’ album “Silk Degrees” is one they played in its entirety at our college graduation party. Hearing any one of the songs from that album takes me back to that grad party, and to folks I haven’t seen since my college days. I think about the guys I had crushes on, and they never knew.
The Doobie Brothers album “Minute by Minute” was playing when my friends and I were moving our stuff into our very first apartment. I was 22 years old. The move took about 5 hours; the album was on steady repeat; must have heard the whole thing at least 25 times, if not 50. Any song from that album takes me right back to that apartment, and all the fun we had.
Several Kenny Loggins songs take me instantly back to my twenties when I wondered if my after-college boyfriend really was “the” guy for me. The answers? “This Is It.” “Keep the Fire.” “Here and Now.”
Any song by Jackson Browne also can trigger time travel. Songs from his albums “Saturate Before Using,” “For Everyman” and “The Pretender” made up the soundtrack of my early twenties to early thirties years. I often wondered how Jackson Browne knew me so well; knew my life.
His lyrics always made me feel like he had “been there.” Whatever life event I was currently processing, Jackson Browne was just a few steps ahead of me on the same path.
“I’m just one or two years, and a couple of changes behind you, in my lessons at love’s pain and heartache school, where if you feel too free and you need something to remind you, there’s this loneliness springing up from your life, like a fountain from a pool…” — Jackson Browne from the song “Fountain of Sorrow”
Other artists on my playlist include Bob Seger, Bruce Springsteen, Carly Simon, Carole King, Dan Fogelberg, James Taylor, Jim Croce Karla Bonoff, Linda Ronstadt, Paul Simon, and Phoebe Snow.
Any one of their songs can take me right back to wherever I was the first time I heard them. I can also remember the life lessons I learned while those songs were playing in the background.
Key message: If you ever see me driving in my car, don’t bother to wave. I’m probably not there. I am in some other time, some other place. And I know I sound AMAZING!
