Music transports you, mentally, I mean, to the place you relate to it too.
Everyone has that one album or artist that they can always come back to in a time of need. For me, it’s Ctrl by SZA.
Whenever I hear the intro to “Good Days,” I get transported back to high school, messing around with my friends, not having a care in the world.
Music has the power to take you back to times you may have once forgotten. Whether the emotion it may bring back to you is good or bad, the nostalgia hits immediately.
Of course, it’s more memorable if the music restores an old memory that is positive, but even the negative ones have meaning.
“Prom” brings me back to, you guessed it, prom. This song surrounded my junior prom, and I love looking back at the old videos of my friends and me singing it on the limo drive to the venue.
“Broken Clocks,” however, takes me back to an old friend who used to love this song. Unfortunately, we had a falling out, but each time I hear it, I think of her and the great memories we once had together.
Memories rush back and hit you like a freight train when certain songs are heard, but even if they aren’t always the best, you can still remember what once was.
Not to get all nerdy, but there is scientific proof that everything leads back to music.
Human consciousness, emotions, and perception are fundamentally quite literally tied to musical physics. Our bodily functions are all natural oscillators, which are waves in our body like the ones used in radio and communication, that connect emotions and memories to our senses.
It’s kind of like when a certain smell makes you think of an old memory. For me, certain fall and autumnal scents immediately send me to my grandma’s house.
Just like how scents make us remember places and people, music does the exact same thing.
Along with the memories, music brings us to social connections as well.
Songs that we once sang along to with our friends and family give us a shared connection with them. You can link the music, or even just a similar song, to the people that you created the connection with.
I can bet that each person reading this article can think of an album or artist that they can relate to. Creating connections to music is what makes it so special.
It almost feels like “if I lost [Ctrl], or did not have [Ctrl], things would just…be fatal” (“Supermodel,” SZA). This album holds a special place in my heart, and I know I can always fall back to it in a time of need.
One doesn’t just listen to music; our nervous systems become it.