The Songs We Keep

Remember the last time you had a song stuck in your head? One that follows you around for days, or that you suddenly catch yourself humming while taking out the laundry on a random Saturday evening?

Well, I’ve been living inside 1973 by James Blunt for the past few weeks. And while the song is about lost love and how Blunt looks back at his youthful days in Ibiza hanging out with a girl named Simona, there’s just something about the way this song tugs at my nostalgia and summons memories of all the joyous and carefree moments I’ve spent with my friends. Even if we don’t talk as much today, I dearly cherish those times. What we had in that moment was perfect. Perhaps many of you share this sentiment.

Lately, though, I've found myself reaching for songs I listened to as a teenager more than ever. This is peculiar because I wasn't someone who actively sought out music back then, although I vividly remember the radio playing on my way back home after school. I've since rediscovered so many of those tracks from artists like Ellie Goulding, Maroon 5 and others I hadn't thought about in so damn long. It might seem natural to reminisce on those tunes, wondering why they sound sweeter today than ever before. Part of it, I'll admit, may be that much of what's being released now doesn't quite sit right with me. But there's more to this than what I can discern about music...

It turns out, our brains have a bias for recalling memories from adolescence and early adulthood, peaking around age 14, and this is linked to a lasting attachment to the music from that era. Researchers and psychologists have been studying this phenomenon in young adults for a while now -- they call it the reminiscence bump. Why is this? Because these are the years we begin to find ourselves. The memories from this period played an instrumental role in shaping us. Memories, however, are only as lasting as the emotions they carry. And music in particular has this uncanny ability to elicit strong emotions during this liminal period.

What I found even more interesting is that this affection can quite literally cascade down to the songs of our parents’ adolescence. This probably explains my admiration for the old hindi songs that my parents used to play on every drive -- something I've started to deeply appreciate now. Sure, our adult tastes are more mature, allowing us to appreciate more layered, complex works on an intellectual level. But inherited music carries this warmth that I probably wouldn't have experienced had I not been exposed to it growing up.

While exploring all these theories may be fun, I find it unsettling to realize that the window for this kind of imprinting is slowly tapering. The music I love now might be the last few ones I'll ever love the same way I loved the songs I grew up with. In a lot of ways, 2026 feels like the start of a new chapter leading up to 2050. Most of the songs I imagine I will reach for decades from now are likely already on my playlists. One thing I can be certain of though is that music will always remain my escape from reality and serve as a reminder of what I felt when I first heard that song.