I've recently come to realise how tightly bound my memories are to the albums that have been my soundtrack to my life at the time, so much so they're like picking up a journal.
After an old friend passed away recently, I was revisiting a lot of those things we bonded over back in our school days. For us it was a love of music, gaming and pro-wrestling so to pay tribute to our friendship and those memories I threw on an old band t-shirt in his honour and spent an evening listening to the albums we’d swap and just have on repeat back in the day.
Nostalgia in these moments is bitter sweet. To relive those memories is a journey, especially when they were of such formative years. The thing that struck me though was how vividly a lot of those memories came back that were otherwise long lost.
I always loved the idea of keeping a journal, and while I had tried at times, the habit never really stuck. Though I came to a realisation listening to those old albums. I have a stack of CDs in storage somewhere, but why would I ever actually need them again? Because those are my old journals.
They’re physical, they were there with me at the time. There are albums in there I forgot I had that I would have binged whether I liked them or not, because pre-streaming if you spent money on an album and you were hungry for music you had to really give it a shot… so even those obscure lost albums have a small slice of memories attached that I would otherwise lose.
That’s not to say streamed albums don’t have the same effect, I certainly have many great albums with memories bound over my life. But there are albums from smaller artists that I recall songs from sometimes but I can’t remember who, and I just can’t find again. They seem akin to old notes on a lapsed cloud service somewhere… you’re never going to stumble across them again.
Music takes us all back to some degree. For me at least, as someone who has always had music heavily in their life they’re my way to be back in those moments. I know it’s not quite the same as a written journals, and these days we have countless photos capturing our lives, but for me musically works wonderfully even if sometimes it can be a little bitter sweet.
Albums turned out to be journals I didn’t realise I had.
