Music has memory.
Revisiting the songs that taught me to pay attention at 13
In the car full of just us girls, between all the Olivia and Showgirl current favorites, someone requested King of Anything — a song my friends and I obviously know by heart.
And just like that we were brought back in time to the year that song was released to us as tiny teenagers.
Music has memory. In 2014, I watched the music video for Shake It Off sitting at the top of my staircase, too excited to hear the new song that I had to pause and watch on the way to my room. In 2020, Pancakes for Dinner was the song I played while I painted, stuck inside during quarantine. In 2022, I was getting off the highway at my college exit when the Stick Season hook first played in my car.
Specific places, vivid memories — all easily retrievable with their respective songs.
Even beyond the surface, the way you can feel where you were or what you were doing, there’s this even more palpable feeling of how old you were when you first loved a certain song. Who you were at that age.
Hearing any Sara Bareilles song, I’m reminded of me at 13. Love Song always on the radio. This album on a CD, looping while I rearranged the furniture in my new “big kid” room covered in polka dots. I was always trying to memorize the spelling of Sara’s name (which I still have to double check.)
Sara Bareilles was one of my first favorite songwriters. One of the first artists whose words stopped me in my tracks, even before I could register what they meant. I can see why younger me liked her. As a creative but anxious kid, I was always disappearing into stories and words. Writing in the margins of books and trying to write books of my own. (I started probably 50 different “novels” but never finished any.) Tons of diaries from my childhood are now gathered in a box, full of ramblings.
Sara’s music uses language that paints thought and emotion in a beautiful light. Hearing complicated feelings articulated clearly and powerfully — I think that must’ve comforted me. Like maybe my own mind was a place I could draw inspiration from too.
Plus, she knows how to write a catchy hook.
At the heart of it, Sara is a great storyteller because she uses vivid, physical language. She describes direction (“sunk down” / “spinning round and round this earthly life”), feel (“calcifying” / “winter’s light feels different on my skin”), and movement (“hang my head” / “I’ll tip-toe away”).
I remember always sticking to how the line “I just keep quiet and count the cars that pass by” sounded. I was fascinated by the scene she was describing, even though I was too young to be familiar with the feelings. I would toss that first verse of King of Anything over in my brain trying to understand all the sensory language — this detail I could hear, this detail I could see, etc.
This music planted a small seed in me. I wanted to tell stories that well. My baby artist brain was learning to pay attention to what caught my eye / ear. This noticing, this muscle of seeing and hearing with intention, would soon become the only way I could make sense of anything.
My friends Caroline Lunne and Jen Shoop often share their daily readings of Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. There’s something about keeping poetry at arm’s reach — if you return to it often, poems will reveal something about you or your life through their words. Something you’ve felt before, or something you’re feeling then. Articulated for you.
And that’s how I feel with music. As the memories associated with certain music circle back around to me, the lyrics are like little messengers. I treat it as my responsibility to pay attention to them. To see what things they have to tell me.
So, just like I did as a kid, I like to write lyrics out, sketch circles around phrases that feel special. Underline anything that makes me pause. Draw arrows, put notes on the side. My own little devotion to the study of myself, through the music I like.
This week, I’m going back to some of the songs I loved at 13. To look and listen as a new version of myself. Cue the nostalgia!
a practice in noticing: song studies on Sara Bareilles
featuring notes from a Genius Lyrics addict (guilty!)
This song was inspired by her friend who was jogging near the Queens cemetery in New York. The language is intense in that context, but it tracks. Exercise does let your mind wander. Especially, I’d imagine, exercise near a cemetery. There’s that rabbit hole / perspective shift (you know the one) of pondering how your life is so tiny in comparison to all the lives before and around you.
“skyscrapers’ little tombstone brothers” is maybe one of the most interesting lyrics I’ve ever heard.
(Also ironic that pre-teen me just danced around to this song in her polka dot bedroom. I knew there was an inspiring message in there, but I fear the existential depth was lost on me.)
Coming off the huge success of Love Song, maybe she wasn’t sure she could make good art like it again. This song seems like it was created amidst a lot of artistic procrastination. Just moving the dirt slowly until anything new grows from it. And making art is like everything else in that way — you just need to begin.
There are those vivid words again:
“Waiting for the road to be laid”
“Jump start”
“Sunk down”
“Taking flame over burning out”
Here are a few small parts of songs that I’m pulling out like stanzas of poetry, circling those iconic sensory words she’s so great at using:
From Gonna Get Over You
From Little Black Dress
From Let the Rain
Honorable mention is every word in Gravity. No comment needed!
Such a masterclass in descriptive writing. It gives me such a burst of energy to notice more, write more, and to use my senses as a gateway to great art.
13-year-old me had such a highly-sensitive heart (hence the ballads in her CD collection). But 25 year old me does too. I’m so thankful that good art found me then. And I’m even more thankful that it keeps finding me.
P.S. There’s no room here to even get into Waitress. So much to say!!!
One more recent note on the link between poetry and music —
PSA! New Mumford & Sons music is coming !!! In this video, Marcus Mumford said a lot of it came from hours of sitting and just writing poems first. So interesting!!
The single that’s out now, Rubber Band Man, came from a poem that Brandi Carlisle sent to him.
I just love this link between poetry and music. Even for me, sometimes writing poem-like lists is so much more attainable than long-form processing or journaling. It helps me get my experiences and emotions out of my head quicker, and therefore the ease and comfort from journaling settles more. I can see how poetry would help a songwriter process and create art from their life in a similar way.
I genuinely don’t know musicians do it, wrapping words up in melodies and building songs from scratch. Thank God they do!
What songs did you love growing up? Maybe pull them out of the archives soon, take a closer look. Pretend like a friend (aka - younger you) has gifted you a book of poetry for your coffee table. Read it with her little eyes, and then again with your own perspective of today.
Our younger selves and the art we gravitated toward — these are true messengers to remind us that the best parts of us are often intertwined with what we love.
Xx
Aubrey
This has my brain spinning in the best of ways!