Growing up working in radio, I learned an interesting bit of applied psychology from my various program directors: people tend to become emotionally attached to music they hear from puberty until their brain stops growing, around age 25. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s not so much that music attaches itself to important events in your life, as the music and the events happen at a time when your brain is filling in a lot of important space with events that matter to you – and, given its evocative intensity, the music that’s going on at the time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
If I ever got to be a phenomenally wealthy mad scientist, ,one of my experiments would be to pay a family to raise their children around nothing but some absurd, archaic genre of music – say, John Philip Sousa marches – through their twenties, and measure to see how many events, first dances and first crushes and first kisses, they associated with marching music. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, about this time in 1985, my brain was getting stuffed with the consequences of my following up on my drunken promise to move to the Twin Cities<\/a> that I’d made about a week earlier at a college homecoming dance. And for the next two weeks as I tried to fill in the many blanks of my half-baked “plan”, my still-growing brain drank in the music that was going on around me, on the radio, on my boom box, and (when I got to the Cities) on MTV, which I finally got to watch. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And to this day, I hear one of those songs, it brings it all back. I hear one of the songs burned into my cortext from that era on an overhead or the radio or at a bar, and I still smell the must of autumn building, of the harvest coming in as I worked my roofing and siding job<\/a>, the feel of the wind as I drove my barely-roadworthy car to MInneapolis<\/a>, the “exhilaration” of my first rush hour<\/a> on my way to an interview.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The smell of fear, the feel of the tingle of hope, and the shiver of taking a huge leap. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve had a theory that the period from 1977 to about 1986 was one of the best periods of all time for popular music. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It might be because it was a fact. Or it might be because it’s associated with that most searingly immediate period in life, adolescence through leaping out into the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Why choose?<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the risk of indulging in nostalgia, I’m going to indulge in some of the rewards of nostalgia. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Growing up working in radio, I learned an interesting bit of applied psychology from my various program directors: people tend to become emotionally attached to music they hear from puberty until their brain stops growing, around age 25. It’s not so much that music attaches itself to important events in your life, as the music […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,14,1],"tags":[455],"class_list":["post-86007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch","category-music","category-uncategorized","tag-soundtrack"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86007"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86008,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86007\/revisions\/86008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}