The Ache From Familiar Songs You’ve Never Heard Before
And Why They Haunt You
This won’t be a piece on music theory or chord progressions, nor an exploration of the cognitive processes underlying music; although those very likely play a role in why we believe we’ve heard a song we’ve never heard before.
This is a piece about love. And time.
This is about how I have come to believe love, feelings, and music travel not just forward, but also backward in time.
It presents just a little intro to a larger, more-researched theory that’s been percolating in me for decades though I only became aware of it about nine years ago when my then seven-year-old daughter interrupted me folding laundry.
I was playing a song on YouTube I first heard when I was in college. Should I tell you the song yet? Or should I wait?
Let’s wait.
I hadn’t heard the song in many, many years. During that time (when I was folding laundry), I had been immersing myself in old music for a book project I was working on. Mainly I was listening to mixed tapes from high school and college my boyfriend had made me, but this song wasn’t on any of the old cassette tapes.
It took me a little while to find the song on YouTube because I couldn’t remember its…
