Music as a time machine

By Isaac Handelman

A few months ago, near the beginning of my time in college, in a fit of what might have been homesickness coupled with my unshakable sentimentality, I set to work compiling a Spotify playlist encapsulating my senior year in high school. I happened upon this idea because I’d been thinking a lot about the ability of certain songs, when played, to transport me back to the times in my life that I associate them with. My plan was to compile every song that had meant something to me over the course of my senior year (a collection that turned out to consist of about 120 distinct tracks) and order them chronologically by the specific time or event in my life for which they held meaning and/or significance. I soon found the task daunting -- after all, certain songs were associated with foggier feelings or memories than others, and were difficult to place in order -- and I gave up.

But my reason for setting out on this endeavor still holds truth: music has a certain, difficult-to-describe ability, possessed, in my experience, by no other media or communicable form in quite the same way, to transport the listener back in time, about as close to literally as any modern technology allows for. Let me try to explain by giving an example.

During the summer after my junior year in high school, I participated in an exchange program that took me to Yamato, Japan, a city about fifty miles from Tokyo. I’d excitedly signed up for the program the October before, itching both to escape America for the first time, and to experience firsthand the Japanese culture that I’d so long been enamored with. Over the course of that year, Arcade Fire’s glittery, operatic anthem “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” became the song I turned to whenever my yearning to depart on the trip became strong. That summer, seated in the airplane bound for Japan, I played the song one final time, and closed my eyes as I was whisked away on the adventure I’d been eagerly anticipating for so long.

“Sprawl II” remains among my favorite songs, but I’ll never be able to listen to it as frequently or with as much bliss as I did during those months leading up to my Japan excursion, because, for me, the song will always conjure up memories of the giddy excitement I felt in those days. But that’s all that they are -- memories. The song brings me simulated feelings, representations of my past elation constructed by the dramatic swells of the music. For five minutes, I can close my eyes and feel how I felt during those five minute periods before my trip, when I listened to “Sprawl II” and made it the time machine that it is for me now.

That’s dangerous. Re-living feelings from the past can bring a comforting, occasionally euphoric nostalgia, but it’s no replacement for having new feelings in the present. I find myself reticent to embrace some of the songs that represent some of the most important moments from throughout my life, because I don’t want feelings from the past to become my feelings in the present.

Such is the immense power of music that it can hold emotions in stasis. But music is only a time machine if one allows it to be so. Certain songs and albums, which previously were associated with memories and feelings as specific as those contained within “Sprawl II,” I’ve found myself capable of re-assigning, of applying to feelings and experiences in the present, instead of acting as vessels through which I live in the past. Music is powerful, but ultimately, it’s only notes on a page, or sounds coming from a pair of headphones. Its ability to whisk one away to the past can be disallowed, perhaps not in all situations, but in many.

Ultimately, a fine balance must be struck. Of course, remembering times gone by is not an inherently harmful act. It can be pleasant, even revealing of deep-set thoughts and ideas that hadn’t been uncovered before. But the present deserves primary focus. For every trip back in time that a beloved song takes you on, a new association deserves to be formed with a new song. If music is a time machine, then we, the time travelers, should be responsible with its power.