This is an essay about music and memory—not because I have any specific opinions about music—but because I am acutely aware of the time-travelling nature of sonic textures.

  • the time we woke up to find that summer had gone: getting closer to the songs of summer
  • with some indie record that’s much cooler: we are who we listen to
  • something as good as our song: music supervision, and the soundtrack of our lives


the time we woke up to find that summer had gone

In the late summer of 2016, I started my freshman year of college. The #9 song on the Billboard charts was a pure pop confection produced by two bedroom DJ ingenues and featuring an on-the-rise indie pop songwriter. During any other season or year, it would be a wholly unremarkable song.

And yet, “Closer” by the Chainsmokers (feat. Halsey) is cursed with the memory of its timing. It was inescapable during the year of 2016: on the radio, on playlists shared with friends, on any speaker near a critical population of everyone under the age of twenty-five. “Closer” was everywhere, and in being everywhere, it became the bedrock of our summer existence that year.

I don’t remember much from Summer 2016. The cultural highlight reel tells me a few things about the ill-fated Pokémon Go fad and headlines from the Rio Olympics, but I don’t remember how the summer felt, tasted, or smelled. The summer months were languid in the way you remember periods of time where you did absolutely nothing, but were hyperaware that you would never feel this way again. Time has dulled my other senses, but my hearing is still resoundingly clear: hey, I was doing just fine before I met you.

Beyond lead singer (but not a trained singer, mind you) Drew Taggert’s strained, paper-thin vocals contrasted with Halsey’s soaring mezzo-soprano (truly, the legacy of this track is carried on Halsey’s back), the song isn’t great. Whatever the song lacks in lyricism and innovation, it makes up for in endurance in our cultural memory.

When you hear “Closer” for the first time in a long time, it’s something of an out-of-body experience. It’s vast and greater than yourself. You listen to “Closer” and you wonder where all the time has gone: and you’re back on the beach or at the party or in a car with nowhere to go but forward. And you’ll ask yourself if you can get any closer, because your memory is failing you and everything is not fine, but you can still hear the voices as if it were yesterday.

The music industry had made it a personal mission to mine and manufacture summer nostalgia. Every August, the music journalists sharpen their pencils and pen listicles about the definitive songs of summer, because there’s always an objective and subjective list. The Greek chorus is made of the likes of “Old Town Road” and “Call Me Maybe” and “Despacito” and all the songs that came before it. It’s a rather eclectic pantheon of music that captured the public’s imagination for three months—a kind of spell that washes over after the solstice—and fades back into obscurity once Labor Day rears its head.

I’m less interested in what these songs are and what makes a good summer song. Perhaps Calvin Harris has an opinion on that, because his 2014 track “Summer” is shamelessly transparent in its motives. Everything else is a gamble on what makes people feel good: because the year has been exhausting, the weather is finally warm, and the soundtrack promises an Elysian escape. What I’m really interested in is the summer earworm.

We have the same suite of Christmas music on repeat, a record of oldies but goodies we carol year after year with equal novelty and enthusiasm. Winter music doesn’t change or deviate from the mean, yet “Jingle Bells” and “Last Christmas” conjure the cozy, fuzzy feelings of the holiday season without any specificity to the year. The Christmas songs in the year of 2016 weren’t meaningfully different from the Christmas songs in the year 2020. They’re the same songs, cut and pasted atop of different memories on different years. This genre is amorphous: a surrogate embalming vessel into which we pour in our end-of-year memories and move on after the ball drops.

Summer is different. Summer is specific. The songs of summer operate as a gas: they expand to fill up the space of your solstice days. They occupy the corners of your attention, as surprise entrants on your playlists, as the background music while you run errands, as backing vocals during conversation with others. Repeated exposure plucks these tracks out of obscurity and into the foreground of your life.

Maybe the heat warps our memories. Maybe our rose-tinted sunglasses reveal a different side of the story. And maybe, these songs are the closest we’ll ever get to the heady sentiment of bright days long gone.

with some indie record that’s much cooler

It’s that time of the year again when Taylor Swift releases a re-recording of a beloved album and I find myself swirling in a tailspin of nostalgia. I’ve spent the better half of two weeks listening to a ten-minute version of a ballad that was already six minutes long. Nine years later, Taylor’s Version revisits that crisp autumn with the patina of navel-gazing wisdom she did not fully possess while heartbroken at twenty-two.

2012 was an excellent year. Much of who I am to this day, I owe to that year in my life. 2012 was also an excellent, albeit confusing, year for music. This was the year that brought “Call Me Maybe,” “Somebody I Used to Know,” and “We are Young” to the airwaves in rapid succession (and in here, is another ramble about how this trifecta of music set the expectations and tone for modern pop music of the next decade). Somewhere in the late fall, Taylor Swift dropped her fourth album, Red, as autumn leaves were falling into place. Musical references are a social bonding structure, and I feel this articulated most potently in the hits of this era.

We spend much of our early years inhabiting an amorphous body of curiosity: absorbing all, opinionated about none. The things we ought to like and dislike are impressed upon us; and at some point in the coming of age, we begin to form judgements in the sonic fury. We and everyone else our age shared the same songbook, played for us by circumstance rather than choice. And years later, we’ll recognize this compendium of radio-friendly hits with the timeless grace of the specific times they represent.

This year was also was the first moment my music taste morphed from a carbon imprint of the Billboard Top 40 and into a discerning library. I don’t think I have a good taste in music; I probably thought I did back then, but I still remember this as a before and after. Before this, I was surrounded by influences that weren’t my own; and after this, I had the preteen agency of personal choice. I listened to a lot of artists that I still listen to today, and my music library has become a selective patchwork of their larger discography from the early 2010s: Florence + the Machine (Lungs and Ceremonials are still murderously good), Mumford and Sons (back in their banjo playing days), Lana Del Rey (Pitchfork recently, and rightfully, regraded Born to Die as the pioneering masterpiece it is). There was a lot of weird and random stuff too that I question in hindsight: Fever Ray, Dry the River, and Stars. I got my first taste of, then spent much of the next few years revisiting, The National’s High Violet.

This piece is incomplete because I’m still trying to figure out how layers of musical choice calcify into facets of personality. How it’s true for all of us, but I can’t place when it happens; and why it’s an experience that feels deeply personal and unique, yet almost obliviously comical in its universality. But I’m reminded of it anytime someone puts on a song from the year 2009 and there’s a collective dissociation from our present reality. I hear it whenever I’m walking alone on an empty street, and my ruminations drift back into the safe harbor of my music canon.

All of this matters because I look at an album eight years later—with Aaron Dessner on the producing credits; and Justin Vernon and Matt Berninger in the headline feature, and Marcus Mumford in the backing vocals of another one—and it feels borne out of my own imagination. It’s why 2020’s folklore feels like the nostalgic imprint of a time I was desperate to recapture, but couldn’t quite reproduce the right textures. It seemed to all click in place. That I had grown up for years listening to Taylor’s music, and she was right there listening to the same songs too.

something as good as our song

Someday, I will write an essay about the music moment™ and the pure magic of marrying a scene with a soundtrack. But until that day, I’ll gush about the deep reverence I hold for music supervision. Functionally, it’s the role of selecting and securing tracks for a work of visual media. When done extraordinarily well, music becomes it’s own character. It lives and breathes with the contours of the cast and blends into the backdrop.

The resume of Alexandra Patsavas stands for everything music supervision is and should be. She supervised the upper echelon of modern classics: The OC, Gossip Girl, Grey’s Anatomy, Twilight, and all the melodramatic films and shows in between (author’s note: this podcast episode covers her legacy on The OC, back in the days when tv music was a vector for virality and novel discovery). A great soundtrack conjures the storybook visual of a place and time. A two-minute snippet of song delicately recreates scene with careful clarity: the characters, the setting, the tension. They were doing this thing at this point of the plot—and the dramatic irony of it all is that they didn’t know this music was playing behind them; but the music was there and so were you.

We supervise the music we play in our own lives.

We look for music in the moods that suit us best: on the mixtape, the iTunes library, the Spotify playlist. The curation lies in the specificity of our choices here. Fittingly, the annual Spotify Wrapped feeds into our deepest solipsistic desires to recall our year through our headphones. For lack of synesthetic effect, I’m a true believer in music memory. I lack all forms of musicality: never learned an instrument; am euphemistically tone-deaf; and bewildered by notation as a foreign language. But I’m fascinated by popular music: pop, as the collective consciousness of what was popular at a given period—and pop, as the visible imprint of a piece of music on a moment in time. If the hands of humanity rested in the hands of the music charts, then the aliens would learn so much about us and what we valued.

Sonic imprints: when you’ve played a song so many times, it has embedded itself into the soundtrack of your autobiography. A dull hum as your life unravels before you. Some excerpts:

  • fine line while sitting at my desk with the immense swell of the drums to mark the change of senior fall.
  • piledriver waltz in a coach seat on a one-way plane halfway across the Atlantic.
  • anchor during long bus rides between here and there, crystallized into the bitter horn of winter.
  • without you alongside late night problem set sessions, a jaunty piano as a jolt from the edge of slumber.

I can never remember where I was or what I was thinking at the time, but I can probably tell you what I was listening to.