I am obsessed with the songs I remember the best. The songs whose lyrics immediately come to mind upon the ring of the first chord. The songs I first heard many years ago, and continue to listen to through my 22nd year. I’ve listened to these songs hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of times.
My old reliables bolster my every playlist, and I never skip them; I often skip other songs just to reach them.
I know this experience is not unique to me; everyone loves their childhood songs. We are addicted to nostalgia. We obsess over the familiar comforts. A song can evoke autobiographical, personal memories and vivid sensory experiences of the moment you heard it. It can bring back the comfort of childhood or the indescribable feeling of hearing a track that feels as though it was made for you and whatever challenge you faced.
Though I know I first fell in love with my favorite, most unskippable songs in my earliest childhood, what makes these songs so special to me is their lack of a tie to a single memory. They bring me back sometimes, but more often than not to a powerful feeling rather than a single moment. Because I listen to them so obsessively, they don’t even feel like childhood songs anymore. They are tied to all of the moments I’ve had set to their glorious backtrack, far beyond my first memories as a kid in a car seat listening to my parents’ radio.
These songs are tied to countless late nights out with friends and my sister, sipping my first and last drinks of the night, running down a hot asphalt street barefoot as fast as I can and desperately trying to somehow escape and remain in my childhood. They are moments sitting and reading silently in the company of my life’s greatest loves, mere feet away, also reading; of swimming in the salty bay water that stings my eyes; and dipping my toes in the lightly lapping waves. The songs are first days and first moments and the repeated jokes and daily loving moments of friendships and loves and new learning experiences. The songs, from Tom Petty’s rock to Otis Redding’s soul to Jack Johnson’s beachy lullabies, are comprised of all the days and countless moments I have spent listening to them.
The first song I’d ever heard (in my likely biased memory) was Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 1976 “American Girl.” I remember thinking for the first time that a song was about me. I was an American girl! It was not a song about a woman or a boy or a man or a rockstar or a soldier or a lover or a friend — just a girl.
Many songs are about American girls and brunette girls and girls from the East Coast – representation in the media is a privilege I possess. But I remember as a kid it felt pointedly about me. The roaring guitars and whispering cymbals were for me, and every lyric was an ode to a life I was excited to live, filled with love, adventure and something nameless I’ve still yet to discover — and maybe never will. “Something that’s so close / And still so far out of reach,” somehow felt, and still feels hopeful to me.
This song makes me feel that I am always at the starting line of the proverbial “great big world / With lots of places to run to.” Every happy playlist, every birthday or family barbecue soundtrack and every late night party or karaoke — that song is one of the first on every setlist.
Otis Redding’s 1967 “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” is another forever unskippable favorite, one that inspires me to slow down rather than speed up.
Though it’s not a love song and many of the lyrics describe loneliness — capturing Redding’s experience living solo on a houseboat — something about the song’s soothing beauty created a vision of a love song I will never shake.
Far before I knew romantic love, I knew what it was like to share a silent moment with someone you care about the most, to watch the tides ebb and flow and feel no need to move or do anything. I know and love the feeling of time well spent and well wasted. In that moment on the proverbial dock of the bay, nothing matters but the present. I never had to strive for this type of love; it was right with me at home.
It is also the perfect soundtrack for being alone, but never lonely, and finding the beauty in idleness. The song features crashing waves and seagulls’ coos. As I grow up and face ticking time bombs that pile up yet never seem to detonate, the natural sounds of the sea never fail to calm me. Whether far from the water or sitting right on it, I find peace listening to Redding recount a whole day spent on the boat in the shining, idyllic peace of the shores.
“(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” is the first song on every lovey-dovey playlist I make, but also every playlist made for reflection and silence — whether in solitude or shared — for any season. I listen to it sitting idly hundreds of times a year, and each time, I’m grounded in gratitude for the unspoiled pleasure of “wasting time.”
While these two obsession songs were from decades ago, the final one came out much more recently, a perfect cover of an already perfect song — Jack Johnson’s version of “We’re Going to Be Friends,” by The White Stripes. I heard Johnson’s version first, likely because of my love for the “Curious George” soundtrack.
Here, Johnson sings a soundtrack of childhood, first days and inside jokes just beginning to form, a guitar-soaked lullaby of life’s best comforts.
The song was released when I was 2-and-a-half years old, ready to head to school, learn my ABCs and form my earliest memories of my earliest friends. But it was also a soundtrack throughout my adolescence and for what felt like learning a new type of ABCs every year of life.
It’s about early childhood, as much as it feels about early adulthood, new beginnings and lasting moments and relationships that carry you along.
At every season of change, I return to “We’re Going to Be Friends.” It seems to hide in my every playlist.
Johnson reminds me that there are more people to love that I haven’t met yet, even as the people I have always loved will continue to remain by my side. Petty reminds me there is so much life to live, and Redding reminds me that there is life and love right where I am.
These songs from my earliest childhood are soundtracks to the most important and mundane times, still, a constant hum behind every waking day that reminds me of what love has and always will mean to me.
Daily Arts Writer Kaya Ginsky can be reached at kginsky@umich.edu.
