This isn't how music memories are supposed to work

Other people get first kisses. I get the Andrew Marr Show

(Credit: Joost J. Bakker)

A brief one today because I’m in transit, the WiFi is capricious and to be honest, I’d been ruminating on that ‘gays and transport’ piece for the best part of a decade and that’s not a terrifically repeatable action.

It occurs to me that, outside Taylor Swift, I long ago stopped listening to new music. This is not a brag, humble or otherwise. No doubt I’m missing out on some ‘banging tunes’ as the kids haven’t said since the Reagan administration. On the flip side, it transforms every song in my iPhone music library (I don’t even have Spotify) into a time machine.

That music has powers of associative memory is hardly novel. How it binds experience and emotion tightly, acts as a time stamp for life events, the way in which repeated listening reinforces neural pathways, how its structure and patterns help the brain to store and recall with far greater ease than random information.

Music is huge for the ‘firsts’ industry. Your first kiss, first breakup, first ‘sorry to chase’ work email. Regrettably, my brain appears to have taken a different tack. Instead of life events, I’ve ended up with this: