Music, a Memory Book
reflections and melodies
Yesterday as I sat at my desk, staring at the blank page of this newsletter, typing and deleting, typing and deleting and the lyrics of a song kept repeating in my head.
Put down what you are carrying
Put down what you are carrying
Put down what you are carrying
It’s a song by Trevor Hall that I put on my Liked Song list some years ago. I scrolled through the list of songs I’ve accumulated over the years looking for it to play and stumbled upon something else entirely. There are the songs that I love, the ones that I felt drawn to at one moment of time and a few that I wanted to go back and discover later. All of them scattered haphazardly on one playlist, not curated for any particular mood or situation. Just years of lyrics and shifting perspectives frozen in time, one song after the other. A map book of my beating, fragile heart.
Now I scroll through this list until I find the Trevor Hall song I’m looking for, tucked in between ‘Precious Love’ by James Morrison and ‘Pray For Acoustic’ by Matt Tell. When I press play I’m transported into another time, a completely different version of myself. A girl I knew many moons ago, who was searching for something else entirely.
I remember this young woman, this version of myself, completely based on the songs that show up on this time frame. It’s the fall of 2021, and I’m driving along the coast of California in rental car that I picked up in San Fransisco. I’m staying in one of the most beautiful towns, in the cottage house of my extended family. I’ve come here in November a few times now. It’s sunny and seventy degrees and I’m sitting behind the wheel, driving along Highway One at sunrise and I’m completely, utterly unmoored. I’ve been single for years at this point and a man I think I love, recently got on a plane to the Caribbean just twenty four hours before I got on a plane for the West Coast. He said he couldn’t date, yet still he’s reaching out daily to FaceTime and though I know I shouldn’t continue to pick up his calls, I can’t help myself. I want to be seen by him. I feel as if I need it, he has some how become oxygen. After after day I run through my day with him, our conversations spanning never more than thirty minutes and for the rest of the day I reread our texts, over and over again. I obsessively check how long our phone calls are each night and then I drink too much wine at the dinner table as I talk it over endlessly with my cousin who flew her own broken heart across the country with me. ‘Young Blood’ by Noah Kahan sits just above those other songs and I remember walking barefoot one night down to the ocean, listening to this on repeat, his lyrics written from what it seemed was my own heartache.
And if you want, I can tell the truth
That this life takes a toll on you
I spend nights stitching up the loose threads of my soul
In the morning I’m bulletproof
About twenty songs back on that same playlist, ‘Light a Candle"‘ by JJ Grey & Mofro sits in a happier time, just weeks before that same boy said goodbye to me. I remember winding down the road with him in the passenger seat of my jeep, Kona in the back, somewhere deep in the Berkshires, on the way to a hiking store, because he was thru hiking and I was visiting him for a day off the trail. I’ve thought of this moment over the years and it’s funny how with the passing of time, a wiser version of myself no longer needs to bury it all. I can look back on those memories with fondness instead of ache. I’m reminded not of the pain it caused, but maybe the lessons instead. The type of love I’m willing to take, the calmness I crave instead. That chapter has become a story to tell, a series of walks in the woods that felt for a moment like a beginning.
If I scroll why far back and I’ll find a list of songs that I used to put on late at night when I was the last one at work and scrubbing the deck of the boats after a fourteen hour day. ‘Atlantic City’ by The Band and ‘Bad Self Portraits’ by Lake Street Dive were two of my favorites for a while. I can still feel the soapy cold water on my tired feet and the calmness that would decent over me on those late nights after bartending. That last hour of work, alone in the marina, my bed and sleep so close. It feels almost like another lifetime lately, but these songs make it feel like yesterday.
There are the songs that became staples to my life on the road. Many of them seem to be melancholy to me, slow ballots and soft folky melodies. Writers and wanderers, out searching for passion, knowledge and a quiet place to rest their heads. As we drove through deserted landscapes at sun fall I wondered often if they were written just for me. ‘Somewhere’ by Vincent Lima felt especially as if it was made for that particular chapter of my life.
She's older now than her mother was at her wedding
But she's younger than she feels she's ever been
She said, I've seen the hills they're much too tall for a twenty-something girl
And mama, womanhood's been hard to settle in
But I'm on my way to somewhere, I swear
I'm on my way to somewhere, I swear
I'm on my way to somewhere with someone and someday
You'll see me and be proud of where I've been
I’ve listened to this song over and over again over the last few years. The lyrics so deeply in tune to what I was feeling when I found the song on a road trip I look in February of 2024, right after we left Massachusetts and before we got on the ferry to Alaska. I remember that version of myself, scared and unsure, big life changes were just starting ad I was so afraid of the choices I was making. Were they the right ones? Was it going to be worth it, leaving behind the security of my job, my whole life for most of my twenties had been bulldozed over, me behind the wheel. Yet I can still feel the hope, passing from California into Nevada late one afternoon, Kona in the passenger seat, knowing for sure that I was indeed on my way to somewhere and that one day I would be proud to know all of the places I had been.
There’s a certain kind of magic to art, isn’t’ there? Especially music for me, an art form that I have no talent but a deep longing to immerse myself fully within. Just as books and writing have the ability to transport me to another dimension, music as always taken me to other versions of myself all together. It’s like opening up one of my old moleskin notebooks and searching through the heart of my soul. Just the melody of a song can take me to another part of my life, to everything that I was carrying at that moment. I can be sitting at my desk in my hometown and suddenly I’m back in time, a little girl sitting at my mom’s counter, listening to Harry Connick Jr. sing us a soft Christmas lullaby and for a moment I’m caught up in the nostalgia of the passage of time, the bittersweetness of the holiday season, everything bathed in soft twinkle lights.
Just for fun as I write this, I jump even further back, some thirteen years and a different playlist entirely. The one from the early days of online music, back when I was twenty and all alone in another country once again on a pilgrimage of sorts . It’s a similar version to the woman I am today I notice as I start to play the songs I used to listen to on the train from my hose families house in Virum, Denmark on my way to class in Copenhagen. It’s a mix of artists I listened to as a small girl, CD’s from my parents collection, Van Morrison, Jackson Brown, Fleetwood Mac and some of the first music I discovered as a young woman out in the world alone. It’s doesn’t surprise me that this part of my playlist, this version of myself at twenty is the one that I most relate to now, as a thirty two year old. That that young woman, scribbling into moleskin journals on the train to class is the version of myself I want to continue to show up for as I enter the new year.
It’s funny to look back though almost a decade and a half of music, just as over the years I’ve skimmed through my journals that are stacked under the bed. The music of my life time draws me back over and over again to the worry I’ve felt, the despair. It’s only in retrospect that we as humans can remember that time heals and that everything we feel is fleeting. Each and every moment feels so utterly permanent, the pain, the worry, the falling in love. It’s always been hard for me to take a step backwards, to see the big picture, my body so fully bogged down in the sensory overload of right now. Yet when I look back, the woman I was at twenty seven, is no longer heartbroken, but happy. The woman I was at twenty nine no longer sits behind the same wheel of her truck unsure. These days I feel more confident in the decisions I make, the path I’ve started to lay out brick by brick. When I think of the young woman with her face pressed up against a train window in some unfamiliar European city, her headphones in, the whole world stretched out before her, I think by now she would be proud. So I suppose a trip down the music memory lane of my adulthood is a good reminder as the new year unfolds around me to simply press play, enjoy the melody because what will be, will eventually, always be.
My favorite book of late was Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability, which I could not put down. It’s a family drama that dives into the complications we’re all facing with the ever present AI and the potential threats to humanity. I loved it and would recommend it to everyone! Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid has been one of the hits of 2025 and my first read of her’s. I will say that I did cry at the end of this book (it was very emotional) but then I was EXTREMELY annoyed by the last page and the sudden bow that was being wrapped around the ending. It wasn’t believable to me. Overall I thought the premise of this book was really interesting and I loved the idea of the love story, two female astronauts training at NASA in the 80’s, but I found the character development to be lacking and the story to be lack luster- but that can be quite typical with books from the romance genre. So maybe grab it for a beach read, or if you’re curled up on the couch over the holiday’s but don’t expect anything profound when reading. Wreck by Catherine Newman and The Irish Goodbye by Heather Aimee O’Neil are both cozy holiday reads that I enjoyed, read quickly and felt like a warm hug while reading. They’re character driven, family dramas that remind me of The Family Stone (my favorite holiday movie) with the beloved Diana Keaton. So both I would say are great light reading for this time of year.
Really enjoyed this. I took a brief road trip last spring, listening to the same kind of time-marking music…at the end, I found “Same Girl” by Randy Newman helped me put if a ll in place. Thank you for writing this.
This is wonderful. Thank you for sharing.