iPodDoU?

I sometimes feel like the ‘shuffle’ mode on my iPod is kind of like emotional/musical Russian roulette. The power of a song to transport me to a specific moment or time is absolutely uncanny. I’m just listening to my iPod, bobbing along a crowded Parisian sidewalk, minding my own business and then BAM! It’s the summer of 2005 and I am zooming along Interstate 80 with Sasha next to me and the midwestern countryside is giving way to the strange and barren place we call Wyoming and we are singing together at the top of our lungs, “We’ve been on the run, drivin’ in the sun, lookin’ out for number one. California here we come, right back where we started from… Californiaaaaaaaaaaa here we commmmmmmmme!” Whoa. It’s so visceral, so real… it’s almost brutal the way the song yanks me out of the present moment and deposits me somewhere else, in a different time and, depending on the song, it sometimes seems like a different lifetime.

“Jane says I’m goin’ away to Spain, When I get my money saved, I’m gonna start tomorrow, I’m gonna kick tomorrrrrroooowwww” wails Jane’s Addiction, and suddenly I am crammed into a booth in Quinton’s in Iowa City, the windows are steamy, the floor is all wet from the sludge dragged in from the streets, I’m sipping a Boulevard Wheat and singing along.

The opening chords of Troubled Hubble’s “Airplanes” and there I am in Gabe’s, holding a Rolling Rock, eyes closed and rocking slowly to the music, surrounded by friends all waiting for the big change up about two minutes into the song, to start jumping up and down like crazy and “…I flew my airplane to your house, rang your doorbell, you came out…”

Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden” is me and Lisa backpacking in Eastern Europe in the summer of 2002. “If You Leave” by OMD is me and my sisters in 1991 riding in the back seat of our babysitter Heidi’s yellow car. The Righteous Brothers in general is riding with my sisters in my mom’s Acura- specifically going to the Edina swimming pool. Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” is going on errands with my dad and my sister Angie (circa 1986) in my dad’s black Chrysler LeBaron.

I think that when you’re in it, you don’t necessarily know which songs are going to bring you back to that time…certain songs have lots of memories attached to them, so in a way their transport power is sometimes diffused a little bit. For example, Jeff Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah” is my freshman year of college in my dorm at Burge, my senior year of college with Sasha in our second floor kitchen at the Purple Palace, and it’s working for the summer at my dad’s office in 2005.

I have to wonder which songs are going to remind me of “now”…which songs I will hear in 10 years and I will think to myself, “Ah! Paris! 2007!” and when I travel back to this moment, I wonder where I will be traveling from.