Wired Mesh

Peter, Paul and Wayne

A Short Essay on Memory

I bought the new Fountains of Wayne album Welcome Interstate Managers two days ago, and since then I've been listening compulsively to a track called "Valley Winter Song." It's a simple, minor key tune with the touching chorus:

The snow is comin' down
On our New England town
And it's been falling all day long
What else is new?
What can I do
But sing this valley winter song
I wrote for you

The song gets to me on multiple levels, but I think it moves me most in how it borrows so well from other songs I like. It's derivitive in the best possible way: it captures the mood of other sorrowful yet peaceful pieces. It has the acoustic guitars of a Badly Drawn Boy track, and an ambient layering of drums and slide that reminds me of the production work of the late Mark Heard.

But what really pulls me in is the first ten seconds of the song: a guitar riff, repeated twice, that I've been trying like heck to place. You know how sometimes you hear a snippet of music, and it puts you in mind of another song that you can't quite remember, but you know matters to you? For the past two days I've been intermittently staring into space, trying to recall where I've heard those sweet, sad guitars before.

Tonight, after three drinks and two more listens, it finally came back to me: the first ten seconds of "Valley Winter Song" are a dead ringer for the guitar part of a Gordon Lightfoot song called "For Lovin' Me." It's a song that Peter, Paul and Mary covered, and I used to listen to it all the time when I was 16 years old, trying to forget (or maybe remember) a girl I had longed for from a distance. It's all coming back now: I used to sit in my second-floor bedroom and stare out the window at the Spanish moss-draped oaks, playing the song over and over on my first CD player. It was on the first album I ever owned.

I have a really bad memory. (I get it from my father, who can't remember movies he's seen a dozen times.) Even when I go back to a physical place where I experienced a defining moment in my life, it's hard for me to completely bring back that time in my mind. Funny, though, how tiny sensory stimuli -- a smell, a strum on a guitar -- can nestle me snugly in the past. It's not that the past comes to me unbidden; instead, I am carried back, willing or not, to that time. I carry back with me the weight of intervening years, the relationships and experiences that have molded me since then. Yet somehow those past feelings still make perfect sense to me, even to the point where I have trouble pinpointing exactly to what time and place I've been carried.

"The past is a foreign country," L. P. Hartley wrote; "they do things differently there." Most of the time, I couldn't agree more. I look at who I was a year ago, five years ago, and wonder who that idiot was. But every once in a while, I am carried back, and I feel right at home.

Posted by mesh at July 24, 2003 02:35 AM | TrackBack