Pic by desireedelgado
Last week I left my iPod Touch in the seat pocket of an American Airlines MD80. The moment I realised it was gone, I felt a panicky sense of loss — not just because I am among the millions who fetishise the shiny surfaces of Steve Jobs’ creations, but because I am so accustomed to having a soundtrack accompany me as I go about my daily business.
I am rarely able to interact with the world without having the comforting buffer of familiar music being piped straight into my auditory canals. And I daresay I’m not alone. Music plays such a massive role in our lives. It revs us up and brings us down. Hearing a long-lost song can dredge up a combination of feelings that immediately catapult you back to a precise time in your life. The effect can be quite extraordinary: nostalgia crossed with unease, with a dash of pleasure thrown in for kicks.
If your life were a movie, what songs would be on the soundtrack? What tunes embody the experiences you’ve had, the troubles you’ve conquered and those exultant moments that you replay over and over? Have a browse through your iTunes and get back to me. In the meantime, here are a few picks from my movie’s soundtrack. (I guess the role of Me will be played by Kirsten freaking Dunst.)
- The Beatles, especially Help!
- Les Miserables
- Massive Attack’s Mezzanine
We had the movie Help! on VHS when I was a kid, and I used to love the magical four-doored house that the Fab Four inhabited. John’s sunken bed was especially appealing, as was the randomly placed flautist who popped up to play the bridge of You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away before disappearing into cinematic obscurity.
We also had Beatles songs on cassette tape — No Reply, Baby’s In Black, You’re Gonna Lose That Girl. My mum had recorded them off the radio back in New Zealand, so you’d hear the odd ad for weekly specials on “chucken ligs” at the local Wellington supermarket.
I still listen to The Beatles frequently. And I can’t wait to play Beatles Rock Band.
My untamed love for the Act One ender, One Day More, is well-documented, but the music of Les Mis is more than just an opportunity to mime multiple singing parts while walking home from the subway stop at 2am.
When I was about six, my mother worked as part of the Sydney crew for Les Miserables. Each night she would tuck my sister and me into bed and then head off to the Theatre Royal, where people were storming barricades, placing themselves in the path of fatal bullets meant for their unrequited lovers and all manner of other exciting things. It seemed like such a magical world, and my sister and I became enamoured of the songs and costumes. We both fancied ourselves as little Cosettes and would pretend that we were at the Thenadiers’ inn, our soot-smudged limbs shivering as we prepared to fetch fetid water from the unlit well.
It was all very dramatic and adventurous, but beyond the make-believe was a sense of genuine unease. See, I used to have this thing about night-time. I’d become incredibly anxious as darkness fell, and would worry that something might go wrong. The details of this looming wrongness eluded me, but though it was irrational, I couldn’t help being afraid. Yeah, I know: a six-year-old with a burgeoning anxiety disorder. Chill out, kid. Anyway, this evening-onset angst coincided with my mother’s night job at Les Mis. So when she left home at dinner time, I would panic. I felt alone and helpless, and had trouble getting to sleep.
My poor mum, faced with a stressbot daughter and a simultaneous need to, you know, make money to feed us, came up with a way to help ease my fearfulness. She brought us the Les Miserables soundtrack — also on cassette, this being 1989 — and told us to press play at 8pm. That was curtain-up time at the Theatre Royal. That way, she said, it would be like we were all listening to the same songs together. It seemed to work, although I do remember jumping down from the top bunk to switch the tape to the B-side because I hadn’t been able to fall asleep after the first 45 minutes.
I had completely forgotten about this entire series of events until I stumbled upon some YouTube videos of the Les Miserables 10th anniversary concert about six months ago. I heard the music and all of a sudden I was six again, sitting on the top bunk with my knees hugged to my chest as the cassette played in our battered silver boombox with the broken aerial. It was amazing how immediate the feeling was. That sense of isolation really hit me — in a way that was heart-wrenching and strange and cathartic all at once. I’m actually trying not to listen to the music too much, because I want to preserve the feeling rather than diluting it with constant playback.
This album marked the beginning of my affinity for trip-hop. I first listened to it at around 14, during what was as close to a goth phase as I would ever get. (This approximately two-month period involved repeated viewings of The Craft and a brief dalliance with Wicca.) Though the goth thing went out the door pretty fast, Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky remain on high rotation to this day.
There are many more artists to list — including Garbage, Fiona Apple, Tom McRae and Radiohead — but this is too long already. I now turn it over to you.
(Oh, as for the lost iPod Touch? After repeated calls to LaGuardia’s Lost And Found yielded nothing, I decided I couldn’t live without a soundtrack, and siphoned a flurry of greenbacks into the coffers of one Steve Jobs.)
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