I read somewhere that music is the closest thing we have to time travel. Listening to certain songs will take us back in time to specific developmental periods in our lives, like timestamps in our personal history. I completely agree. Certain songs mean certain things. And certain songs evoke specific emotions. Music is a powerful tool, certainly not the “blunt tool” that Hannibal Lecter accuses Clarice of using on him at their first meeting in The Silence of the Lambs. Time to dissect with another round of music roulette.

Music is a powerful, accessible memory cue. Therefore, I am setting the shuffle loose again for another round of music roulette to resurface my deep memories. This has been helping me recall personal experiences and process the emotions that are clogging my memory storage. Especially since I don’t have my journals on hand for me to scour for memory triggers. Part of a midlife renewal plan, the music based therapy part of my sabbatical. I’m going to let the music do the heavy lifting again. Here we go.

There is a close link between music, emotion, and memory. I recently read somewhere that there is a major link called “music-evoked autobiographical memory”. Who knew my music roulette explorations had a name! And that there were so many studied done on the subject. In that vein, let’s continue digging into my mental archives via a randomly selected song list pulled from all the songs I have listened to and liked on Spotify. In the words of the defunct Navy slogan: Let the journey begin…