A Musical Travel Tribute

First, a caveat: the contents of this post are in no way intended to persuade people to listen to any of the below-mentioned songs, artists, or bands. I am not pretending to be a music connoisseur. In fact, before you read any more, you should know the following in order to judge accordingly:

1. The only Christmas songs I will willingly listen to are by Wham! (and I write Wham with an !) and Run-DMC.

2. Lately, I cannot stop listening to Jay-Z's 'Dirt Off Your Shoulder" and Run-DMC's 'It's Tricky' because I think both songs are awesome.

3. Regarding the Ray LaMontagne songs 'Hold You in My Arms' and 'You Are The Best Thing': I think any guy who sings them to me would be subjected to my immediately getting down on one knee and proposing.

So there ya go. That's me and music. Well, not exactly. Some music becomes inextricably linked to places. I hear a specific song, 'Cliffs of Dover' for example, and I am immediately transported back to my adolescent self sitting in my Isuzu Trooper in the parking lot of Baird's Store  (no, it's not that kind of parking lot memory) where a friend and I were hanging out listening to music while waiting for another friend to arrive. Music can make memories rise from the dusty storage of my mind. That's what this post is about.

Most people around my age remember their first-ever album, and I am no different (The Muppet Movie soundtrack on vinyl; before you laugh or judge, I was only 7).  I even remember the first CD I listened to in my then brand new portable CD player. I was living in Tokyo at the time, the city where people breathe technology, where I had a cell phone that was years more advanced than any cell phone my friends had back in the U.S. But, foregoing music technology, I listened to music on a Sony Walkman.  I was finally convinced to take the plunge into the 21st century (it was 2001) and retire the cumbersome, outdated Walkman.  One day, I took the Yamanote train line to Akihabara, the neighborhood to buy electronics in Tokyo, where I purchased a Sony Discman.

Akihabara (photo from Wikitravel)

And then I bought the newest G. Love and Special Sauce CD: Electric Mile.  I put it in my Discman, pressed play, and immediately heard this: "It could be so nice but the world is not ready, yeah. It could be so nice but the world is not ready yo. Whether you're a black man, or you're a white man, or you're from England or from Japan." As soon as he sang "or from Japan," I was hooked. Since I actually was in Japan, the song had some meaning to me, as lame as that sounds. Thus, the song became my Tokyo-train-platform-walking song. And my walking-home-from-the-train-station song.  I felt so cool to have a new Discman and jam out in line on the crowded train platform. Yea, you don't need to tell me just how uncool I really was; just let me have the memory.

 

There I'd be, bopping along to G. Love, right before being shoved into the most crowded space I ever willingly entered on a daily basis, a train car on the Saikyo-sen. Below is an example of exactly how crowded it was. And, yes this did actually happen. Everyday.

 

Before I became an expert at napping on packed train cars in Tokyo, I took my first trip driving solo across the United States. I was 22 or 23 at the time, freshly graduated, with a DJ friend who made me several mix tapes for the ride.  I had a brand new car, gas was as low as $1/gallon, and the entire country stretched out before me. I listened to his tapes over and over again; how could I not repeatedly listen to a tape he had titled 'Cuts For Ya Butt'?

I listened to it so many times, and I drove by so many cornfields in Nebraska and Iowa, that now when I see this:

from: http://www.ecofriend.com/

             I hear this:

 

Nearly everyone listens to music while driving, so I'm assuming we all have similar types of associations with places we've driven by or to or through.  I also assume that all runners who listen to music while running can hear a song and remember a place they ran. When I lived in Costa Rica, I rarely deviated from my usual running course. The reason for that was because my running route looked like this:

I didn't want to run anywhere else. Ever. So every other day, I made the easy downhill run to the beach, ran the length of the beach and back, and proceeded to run back up a really steep hill to home. The hill was so brutal, in fact that 1) I never took pictures of it, and 2) I made a special playlist on my iPod entitled 'Hill to Home,' with songs competing for my billing as the best song to listen to while tackling the hill. The winner?

 

 

 

I made it up that hill  every time.