Musico-Temporal Links, or, do I have to move to Chicago now too?
Sometimes—no, often, for music dorks—an album or artist will become inescapably associated with a particular time or place in a listener’s life. This has happened to me quite a bit; The Brilliant Green’s Terra 2001 with a visit to the Bay Area, Orange Pekoe’s Organic Plastic Music with Toyooka in November, the Casshern soundtrack and Brian Wilson’s Smile with the 3 AM commute to Target in Missoula, Montana—these are not thematic or semantic associations, but rather experiential ones.
Sometimes it happens with new music, and sometimes it’s with something you’ve had for a while, but in my experience, the bond between place and song is strongest when the listener first “gets” the music, and plays it frequently for a while in a particular context.
It’s hard to predict when this kind of thing is going to happen, but I already know that Sufjan Stevens’ “Illinoise” is going to be my First Year in Grad School Album. I knew this after I listened to the entire 74-minute work and immediately replayed it. Three times. It’s making me nostalgic for right now. How is that even possible? God help me.
There is some cognitive dissonance here; the album is a great, sprawling tribute to Illinois, and Hawaii is about as far as you can get from there, culturally and geographically. I’ve never even been to Illinois. With this album, I get the sense that I’m missing out, but paradoxically, I don’t need to actually go there now; I can just listen to the music. So, to answer the question posed in the title: No. I am already there.