Poor old blog – I just completely abandon you whenever I have a personal crisis! Well this time was more of a family one. It’s called house hunting and now that we are in the process of getting approved I can take three deep breathes and allow some space in my brain for other things.
This post was inspired by Bianca’s post at Bigwords, their family is also moving and she’s lamenting the potential loss of memories linked to their physical house. We have been gypsies for so long that I have to carry our memories with us, and they seem to find their transport mostly in music.
My father spent most of his professional life working in the Aussie music industry and The Daddy and I met studying contemporary music at uni so we’ve always had a lot of music around us. While house hunting we were looking at two places, one had a red kitchen and so naturally will forever after be named The Red House after Mr Jimi Hendrix’s genius. The other one was on the top of a hill, but it channeled Josh Pyke’s Middle of the Hill for me. Naturally all week these two songs have been my mental soundtrack.
The repetition of those two songs started me thinking about how instrumental (excuse the pun) music is in building memories. Obviously there were songs that can instantly recreate childhood (Michael Jackson, Fleetwood Mac and Elton John) artists that saw me through high school (thinking Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana and Tori Amos) and university (Dig were big at the time), a lot of music around gigs and even some songs that still remind me of ex-boyfriends…..and I’m not sure those associations will ever disappear. In fact the first time The Daddy and I met we bonded over a shared love of 60’s and 70’s bands Crosby Stills & Nash, Joe Cocker and Jethro Tull among others. And of course there’s my Top 10 artists/albums/songs – but I can’t really narrow them down to a Top 10 so I guess that they don’t really exist 😉
BUT for me the albums that will live in my heart forever are those I was obsessed with while pregnant, yes I played them over and over again – they were the soundtrack to grow little humans by! And by default each of my children have songs – not songs they picked but my favourites off these albums. And so today I share them with you.
Miles’ album was Lior’s self titled debut and Autumn Flow the song (Had he been a girl, she would have been Autumn.)
Tilda’s album was Josh Pyke’s Memories and Dust and her song the title track
In hindsight not traditional Baby songs, and quite dark – they can still make me cry, but so does everything else these days.
As the kids grew their songs changed – Lennon’s Beautiful Boy for Miles, Little Ray of Sunshine for Tilly and lately Simon & Garfunkle’s Feeling Groovy! The list will keep growing as they do. And so we take our memories with us, as boxes of CDs in the garage, our iPods and media center and more than anything else our internal jukebox.
Does music make your memories too? What’s your soundtrack?
Samantha Currie 